Tonight Tonight

Smashing Pumpkins majordomo Billy Corgan is an ambitious man, for sure, and nowhere is the notoriously supercilious auteur’s shameless sense of artistic grandiosity more evident than on 1995’s extravagantly titled ‘Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness’, a sprawling, 28-track double-album that certainly lived up to its so-called ‘infinite’ facet. An exhaustive, exhausting listening experience that took in wildly disparate genres like prog-rock, electronica, folk, industrial rock and synth-pop, to name just a few, this behemoth of a record amazingly made it to the top rungs of the major-league registers, even landing at the top spot in the much-vaunted Billboard album chart. Of all the singles spawned from the collection, the surging ‘Tonight Tonight’ remains the most fascinating, mostly by dint of its decidedly un-Pumpkins-like structure. Eschewing the band’s familiar post-grunge sensibilities for a more restrained, elegant aesthetic, ‘Tonight Tonight’ practically bursts forth with its Technicolor musical vividness, distinguishing itself through its insistent rimshots, lively guitar riffs and a full-bodied, sustained orchestral-string arrangement that just stops short of musical overkill. Check out the appropriately cinematic video clip, an elaborately sly homage to George Méliès's historic silent film ‘A Trip to the Moon’.