This is the sound of Billy Corgan being handed the keys to the studio, the universe, and probably a mirror he never stopped gazing into. Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is not so much an album as it is a sprawling monument to self-indulgence. Across two discs and 28 tracks, Corgan tries to be everything at once—angry teen prophet, fragile poet, guitar god, misunderstood genius—and ends up being mostly exhausting. There are a few good songs scattered in the mess (1979, Tonight, Tonight), but you have to wade through a lot of overblown, melodramatic sludge to find them. Corgan’s voice, never the band’s strongest asset, is everywhere—whining, whispering, shouting, often in the same song—and it wears thin fast. There’s no editor in sight, and no one seemed willing to tell him that maybe not every idea needed to be a track. The album jumps from orchestral ballads to punishing riff-fests like a teenager flipping through outfits before a prom they didn’t want to go to in the first place. It’s ambitious, sure, but ambition without focus turns into bloat. For all the grandeur, the emotion feels more performative than profound. It wants desperately to be important, to be the statement of a generation, but the result is something closer to an endless diary entry—loud, overwrought, and full of feelings, but ultimately lacking clarity. A shorter, sharper album might’ve been great. This, instead, is Billy Corgan’s endless guitar solo of a personality on double vinyl.