The Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Cover Artwork)

The Smashing Pumpkins

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995)

Virgin


The third and most famous album by seminal alt-rock act Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (or as I like to call it, Melodrama and the Infinite Song List) is probably the most overrated album ever. The music press has continually heaped praise on this vaguely conceptual rock-opera for the last 20 years, despite the fact that there are 28 songs on the album and only three of them are any good. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" is a crucial jock jam, "Zero" is a good song, and I don't change the radio when "1979" comes on. The rest of the album is so boring it's unbelievable.

Let's face it; 1995 was a really boring year for music unless you like pop punk. There's no better example of this than Mellon Collie, the album heralded as the year's best by a large conglomerate of mouthbreathing music journalists and reiterated a calendar year later by the idiots at the Grammys. If you've ever been listening to a completely average 12-song album and thought to yourself "wow, this album is alright, but 16 more songs would make it great!" then Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness might be for you. However, if you're a reasonable human being with a brain in your head, you might wanna skip out on this one, or at most just listen to the singles.