Personal, subjective rankings with a short commentary.

Number 3

“X.Y.U.” by the Smashing Pumpkins

Album: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Track: Disk 2: Twilight to Starlight, 9

Runtime: 7:07

“And in the eyes of a jackal I sayyyyyy KAAAAHHH-BOOM!!!”

Representing the apotheosis of their careers, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, by the Smashing Pumpkins is an epic double-album. A concept album containing multitudes, it is massive in its soaring ambition and damn near caused the band to self-destruct. The double-album is crammed with hits: “Tonight, Tonight,” “Zero,” “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” “Thirty-Three,” and “1979.” As has been written elsewhere, The Smashing Pumpkins aspired to become a kind of grunge Led Zeppelin. Hailing from the Chicago music scene, it was divorced from the Seattle grunge scene, although it had been routinely lumped together with what become known as “grunge.”

Mellon Collie reflects Billy Corgan’s wide-ranging musical tastes. “Zero” and “Bullet with Buttefly Wings” are solid rockers. “1979” has a New Wave gloss. Lesser-known gems include the thrasher “Fuck You (An Ode to No One),” the acoustic fever-dream “Cupid de Locke,” and “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans,” a sprawling prog rock masterpiece clocking in at over nine minutes.

And then there is “X.Y.U.,” a bracing seven minutes of primordial sludge. Slotted between “Stumbleine”, a short acoustic wisp of a song, and the haunting elegiac “We Only Come Out at Night,” “X.Y.U.” begins as a slow and heavy musical exorcism. It feels like a hyper-extended primal scream. The song speeds up at the end, Corgan’s vocals becoming a kind of oral hand grenade ready to explode. Dark and demonic, it comes near the tail-end of the second disk, a therapeutic shedding of old skins. The rest of the tracks are relatively low-key and muted, which comes as a relief from the lengthy screaming anarchy of “X.Y.U.”