10 Perfect '90s Rock Albums That Are Ridiculously Long

There's a good chance that no one is going to fully understand the process that goes on Billy Corgan's brain before making a Smashing Pumpkins record. Considering this is a man that rerecorded every single guitar part on Siamese Dream to make sure that it was just right, the word perfectionist doesn't even begin to describe the kind of creative that you're working with here. And once he had his first taste of massive success, Corgan knew he had to dream even bigger for the follow up.

Spanning across two discs, Corgan had once described Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness as a Gen X reinterpretation of something like Pink Floyd's the Wall, with the same kind of grand scope that filled Roger Water's rock opera. You can definitely see what he's talking about from the moment you sit down as well, taking all of the epic sounds that he loved and putting them into a rock context, whether that means piano ballads or some more acoustic material in the mix.

Though there are still the trademark Pumpkins songs like Bullet With Butterfly Wings and Tonight Tonight, the band that shows up here is a lot darker than they were before, with songs like Jellybelly having the same kind of metallic sounds that you would have normally heard on a Pantera record. This might not be the best starting point for any Smashing Pumpkins fan, but once you've got the classics under your belt, you're in for a hell of a ride once you get here.