Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

I always preferred SD & Gish, & PI, to MC &the IS. MC kind of bored me apart from a handful of tracks, tbh.

  On 10/3/2012 at 11:03 PM, sirch said:

I always preferred SD & Gish, & PI, to MC &the IS. MC kind of bored me apart from a handful of tracks, tbh.

Likewise. MC&IS had some killer tracks but as it goes with 99% of double albums, there is some filler.

+1

To me Siamese Dream was their apogee.

Siamese Dream is definitely the best, but this album comes in a close 2nd for me. There's a bit of filler but to me it's mostly good. I was so into this album when it came out... everything they did afterwards kinda fell short for me.

If you want a copy of the remaster but aren't into the bonus tracks, there are two other versions of this being released: a 4LP set (although that'll still be pricey I'm sure because it too is getting a fancy box), and a "standard" 2CD reissue.

That said, all the bonus material included on the previous three reissues (Gish, SD, and PI) has all been killer, so I'm sure it's worth it again. Outtakes that have been floating around as bootlegs have never sounded as good as they do on those previous reissues.

  On 10/3/2012 at 1:49 PM, manmower said:

Does anyone else think the extras on these deluxe reissues tend to detract/distract from the focus of the original release, or in the best case, add nothing? I usually avoid them. And I've made exceptions to that rule, but to be honest half the time I end up regretting them. In fact the only two cases off the top of my head that I don't regret, were deluxe issues of brand new releases, not reissues per se.

 

i like outtakes etc as long as they are on a seperate disc. i HATE it when they tack them on the end of the album. that is baaaaaaad.

big fan of this album when it came out. was a big pumpkinhead. haven't heard in 10 years. gonna put it on right now.

ok after listening to disc1 there were some standouts but i have to agree with everyone else that this is far from their best work. not going to listen to disc 2. teenage memories ruined.

in other news did you see james iha released a 2nd solo album? i really liked his first but couldn't get past the 3rd track on the new one.

Amazon UK have this stuff up for pre-order: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mellon-Collie-Infinite-Sadness-1DVD/dp/B008Z9L8QI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1351274863&sr=8-1

£140 for the 5CD + 1 DVD set.

£140.

Vinyl is same price FYI.

Cheers Ron,

Definately gonna wait for the critics reviews to follow, before I decide on which path to take with this leviathan. Like a few said before I hardly ever bother with second discs of deluxe cd reissues anyway. If it's just piles of nonsense then fuck it I'll pay a few quid for the album.

Siamese Dream, Gish, and Pisces were all well-priced, nicely-designed yet still pretty comprehensive box sets. While I want the material on the 5 CDs, I refuse to pay £140 just for the fancy packaging. Pretty annoyed by this...

No doubt about it Ron, one hundred and forty nicker is a lot of cash.

Considering what you'd pay for one of the original vinyl versions, the price seems more than reasonable to me.

Also, as someone who followed the band very obsessively for years through live recordings, demos and near impossible to find rarities, the bonus materials on the reissues is meant more for people like me.Getting master/studio quality recordings of things that have been fan favorites in the bootleg community for over a decade couldn't be more exciting!

I'm pretty sure I'll be getting a promo of this (probably just a digital version but whatevs) so hopefully will be able to report back on the content / mastering.

I can't believe the price of the cd set is going to stay at £140 though. I mean, it's nicely targeted for the Xmas market and whatnot but no fucker is going to pay that amount of money.

Vinyl reissue is going for $74 on Amazon.com currently so I expect the UK price will come down to £80-£90 before the release date.

Yeah, I keep thinking/hoping that the price is surely going to come down. I wouldn't classify myself as 'obsessive', but I'd still put myself in the 'massive fan' bracket who would pay a reasonable amount for a nice set such as this (vinyl or CD). Even £70 would still be hefty, but I'd probably go for it at that price.

PS UZI LOVER

So it looks like they're doing their best to fuck up this reissue in every way they can. Deluxe vinyl and cd are still both £140 on Amazon; haven't seen any press about the reissues anywhere and the label still hasn't sent through the promo that my publication was promised meaning it's now too late to feature it in the December issue. It's not even mentioned on the official SP site with a couple of weeks until release.

Good job guys.

this album turns 25 today. and what other way to celebrate, than for Billy to announce a 33 track sequel to Mellon Collie that will be released at the end of next year!

https://www.stereogum.com/2103278/smashing-pumpkins-announce/news/

so just to recap - he's got a 20 song album coming out next month, a 33 song album next year, AND he announced a follow up to that Shiny:Vol 2 piece of crap that is 75% done. AAAAND he announced a massive stadium tour next year that will "honor" Mellon Collie (whatever that means).

thanks Billy, for continuing to drag the pumpkins name down into the abyss of mediocrity. oh well. 

that's a yikes from me!

oh well, mellon collie still fucking bangs. mega album.

and for what it's worth, even though the new music is well dodgy, they are still a great live band (saw them in wembley a few years ago) so at least the stadium tour should be deece.

I bought Melon Collie when I was about 15 years old from HMV in Oxford.

While me and my mates waited for a bus to take us home, a gang surrounded us and mugged us of everything we had bought that day.

It shook the shit out of me, and to this day I have never purchased another copy of the album.

Infinite sadness

happy birthday to good album with almost zero (hehe) bad songs and of course some great songs on it. 

that said, it hasn’t aged as well as a lot of their other stuff, imo. the grandiosity feels really tryhard. should’ve focused more on the songs and less on the concept. 

  On 10/23/2020 at 6:30 PM, auxien said:

should’ve focused more on the songs and less on the concept. 

 

Agreed 

I still have a soft spot for it. I always associate this album with the month of October, usually the only time I ever play it.

and after seeing the announcement yesterday, I went googling and found a quote from Billy where he said he wrote Mellon Collie for 14 - 24 year olds. sorta had an "a ha" moment when I read that.

for me this is the pumpkins album that holds up the most

I was into the album when it came out, having loved the previous two, but as soon as "Tonight, Tonight" and "1979" started getting airplay that was pretty much it for me and this album. To this day I detest those songs. Short of any post-Adore material, since I haven't bothered to listen to any of that stuff enough to remember any songs, they are the two SP songs I hate the most. I CANNOT STAND them. And yeah, this album is bloated.

That said, Adore is underrated. 

For me, Siamese Dream is the obvious musical peak for SP. A stone cold rock classic. 62 mins of pure bliss. I understand those who call Mellon Collie bloated, and I could easily(?) remove 40 mins of it to make it fit on a sincle cd or something. But I mean... look at the title, the coverart, the pretentiousness, the almost delusional whole package of it. It's almost unheard of. It came out two weeks before my 18th birthday. And never before or even after, has a band I felt so connected to released such a grand concept album.

I had high hopes for Adore, but the cringey lyrics and the latex emo style just put me off. I've tried to listen to their more recent output but it's so unbelieveably poor compared to the Gish-Siamese-Mellon Collie era, imo.  

  On 10/26/2020 at 4:10 PM, scumtron said:

I had high hopes for Adore, but the cringey lyrics and the latex emo style just put me off. I've tried to listen to their more recent output but it's so unbelieveably poor compared to the Gish-Siamese-Mellon Collie era, imo.  

adore has some gems and is worth revisiting, but i can see how their image was off-putting. they just looked like a complete parody band from that point.

the first half of machina is solid too, but then it drifts into snoresville.