Overblown Pumpkins With Grandiose New Double Album, Smashing Pumpkins Tried For A Masterpiece, But Made An Endurance Test

That Billy Corgan, he’s so outrageous!

Where other alterna-heroes fear to mosh, Smashing Pumpkins’ undisputed leader dives right in.

Billy Corgan thinks big. Big, big, big. How big, you might ask? Well, how about the first superstar double studio album of the alternative rock-era big?

Twenty-eight new songs and nearly 120 new minutes of music big?

Would-be masterpiece big?

At once the silliest and most pretentious album title of the year big?

“Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” (Virgin), which comes out Tuesday, is the magnum opus in question, and Billy Corgan wants you to be impressed.

It was created by Corgan and his fellow Pumpkins to walk among the ghosts of oversize albums past. (Besides its fearless songwriter-singer-guitarist auteur, the band consists of guitarist James Iha, bassist D’Arcy and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin.) It means to be this Chicago foursome’s “Exile on Main Street,” or its “White Album” or “The Wall.” Or, more appropriately - considering that the Pumpkins covered “Landslide” on last year’s B-sides set “Pisces Iscariot - its own version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk.”

Of course, it’s not so easy to be overblown these days, and not just because it’s uncool to be ambitious in a decade of downsizing. The logistics of the music business argue against grandiosity. Since compact discs can contain over 70 minutes of music, most repackaged old doubles fit on one CD; to be truly overreaching these days, you have to outdo yourself.

Mercifully, “Mellon Collie” doesn’t come equipped with a “story.” It’s not a concept album, and it’s not weighted with the burden of trying to make coherent sense.

But all the other signs of portent are present. The two volumes are subtitled “Dawn to Dusk” and “Twilight to Starlight.” (Question: Shouldn’t the song “Tonight, Tonight” be on Disc 2?) It opens, of course, with a piano and strings instrumental that sets the tone for an album that buys into the time-honored fallacy that classical music is “essentially” better than rock ‘n’ roll. And if you add a big-string thing, that elevates power riffing to high art.

The Pumpkins parted ways with noted alterna knob-twiddler Butch Vig - who produced both “Siamese Dream” and the band’s 1991 debut, “Gish.” They have hooked up with British producer Flood, known for providing frightfully dark soundscapes for U2’s “Achtung Baby,” Nine Inch Nails’ “Downward Spiral” and PJ Harvey’s “To Bring You My Love.”

The Flood touches are apparent. On “Love,” and especially on “Tales of a Scorched Earth,” Corgan’s normally thin, wheedling vocals are intensely processed, giving him that Trent Reznor voice-of-doom authority. And Chamberlin’s rhythm beds are sampled, looped and other wise electronically augmented, to best effect on “1979,” a propulsive, almost dance floor-ready reminiscence that’s haunted by the specter of death; it’s the album’s best track.

Considering “Mellon Collie” is a two-hour record, its individual songs are often not as overblown as in the past: Only the would-be mystical frippery of “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans,” the interminable screeching of “X.Y.U” and the dreamy, until the pummeling starts, “Thru the Eyes of Ruby,” stretch beyond five minutes.

For the most part, the pointed departures from the Pumpkins’ whiney whisper-to-a-scream signature sound are the most successful songs on the album. From the nicely orchestrated, sweetly psychedelic “Galapogos,” to the music-hall bounce of “We Only Come Out at Night,” to the flowery poetic “Cupid de Locke,” Corgan and crew stretch their boundaries. And the whole of “Mellon Collie” comes off with a sense of genuine interplay that’s a vast improvement over “Siamese Dream,” an album on which Corgan’s perfectionism moved him to trash many of his bandmates’ contributions and to rerecord the parts himself.

“Mellon Collie” has its pleasures - the lift of the string section on “Tonight, Tonight,” for instance, and the raw power of the guitar sound on the Bowie-esque “Here Is No Why.” And Corgan’s search for communal ecstasy (“We’ll find a way to offer up the night tonight,” he sings, at the start) is heartfelt, though if he searched for a few genuine pop songs, it might be more helpful.

And Corgan’s musings on the possibility of redemption, the loss of innocence or the self-defeat of pointless anger never provide the grand pay off he desires. “God is empty,” he squeals, “Just like me,” and it’s the second part of the statement that rings true.

“I fear that I am ordinary,” Corgan, 28, sings too honestly in “Muzzle” - and this album exists mainly to insist that the opposite is true.