Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (Deluxe Edition)
This deluxe edition of one of the most important and artistically ambitious albums of the \'90s features a remastering of the original album by Bob Ludwig and 64 previously unreleased or alternate versions of songs handpicked by Billy Corgan. Even before it was further boosted by Ludwig here, the original album was one of the finest-*sounding* albums of its day, with producer Flood and his longtime associate Alan Moulder ensuring that every guitar chord achieved epic grandeur. The album spanned two fully packed CDs upon its original release, making it essentially a 4-LP set. The songwriting was solid, and Corgan was clearly on a mission to inject his prog-rock interests into a slicker-than-grunge hard rock sound. Highlights among the bonus cuts here include the Sadlands demos of \"Methusela,\" \"Autumn Nocturne,\" \"1979,\" \"Glamey Glamey,\" and \"Bullet with Butterfly Wings\"; the alternate takes of \"Thru the Eyes of Ruby\" (take 7 and acoustic) and \"Medellia of the Gray Skies\" (take 1); and the soothing instrumentals \"New Waver\" and \"Zoom (7ips).\"
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was one of the most generous records of the 90s. Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed. This mega-deluxe box set pads the original with an additional 64 tracks.
The defining opus of alternative rock, 1995’s double-disc concept album Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness captured the post-grunge zeitgeist more completely than any other record. With their androgynous, dead-faced expressions and smothering, distorted guitars, The Smashing Pumpkins embodied Gen-X pessimism,…
As is fitting for one of the most ambitious and indulgent commercial rock records of the 1990s, this extravagant reissue takes Mellon Collie's greatness as given and adopts a warts-and-all approach for the bonus tracks, placing instrumental drum-machine jams and scrappy alt-takes side-to-side with previously unheard curios and cleaned-up demos.
ClashMusic: Read an album review of the 2012 reissue of The Smashing Pumpkins 1995 album 'Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness' from Clash Magazine.
Mellon Collie remains the Pumpkins’s greatest album, the soaring vision of a band clearly in its prime.