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I was walking around Tyson's Corner Mall the other day -- the most staggering monolith of consumerism in at least a 300-mile radius around my home-ground. (In fact, there are two "Tyson's", each of which dwarfs all other nearby malls. I was in the nice one, as "Tyson's II" is referred to by its snobbier, wealthier clientele.) Just for shits and giggles, I walked into a "music store" -- CD chain The Wall, where each disc costs upwards of $17.95, with occasional "sale" discs for a staggeringly cheap $15.99. To my dismay and amusement, I noticed A Tribute to Audioslave. I was literally stopped in my tracks. Here, I thought, was the last possible damning piece of evidence to make me, and you, despise Chris Cornell, truly and forever. Put aside Cornell's poor solo albums and the fact that Audioslave is one of the most godawful, silly-named, commercial maneuvers of all time. The simple fact that there were bands willing to lower themselves to making a tribute to Audioslave was the equivalent of me bowing down and praying to the marble and faux-gold trimmings of Church Tyson's.
What a change from the sweat-soaked conviction of the fiery-eyed Chris(t) Cornell of old! Leading Soundgarden's grunge charge, Cornell at least seemed ready to die for rock-n-roll. And now a tribute album had been prepared for his most anti-grunge, anti-genuine farce yet. So, again, for shits and giggles, I pulled out my old, dusty copy of Superunknown, perhaps hoping to restore my image of the man. It may not justify all the travesty that Cornell has taken part in since its release, but it does come close.
Superunknown ought to be listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as one of the definitions of "massive". The album is mammoth; at fifteen tracks, and over 70 minutes with nary a breather in sight, it's a thing of sheer overwhelming, non-stop power.
I'll get its (and in general, Cornell's) problems out of the way immediately. There's some grunge sludge mixed in with its better moments. It's poorly produced -- the recording levels on guitar, bass and drums are almost exactly the same. At over 70 minutes in length, it's bound to have a few duds, and it does (though not so much as one Blueberry Boat). And yes -- its lyrics are generally of a... well, I'd be kidding you if I said that they sound particularly intelligent or thought-out. Excepting occasional sharp lines ("I sure don't mind a change," from "Fell on Black Days"), Cornell not only wades through incomprehensible non-sequiturs and displaced angst, he even creates a few terms that only he knows the meanings of -- e.g. the famous "Spoonman" and the album's title. However, anyone who's looking for lyrical insight from Cornell is going to the butcher for a pastry. What most of us are looking for is the man's voice.
And what a fucking voice. Not only does Cornell have one of the sickest ranges of any rock singer ever, he can belt out (on key!) his lyrics with the fury of God Himself. A single one of the man's wails (from the title track, for instance, during Kim Thayil's solo), could make entire populations piss their pants. Cornell's voice is, bluntly put, awesome; it literally induces awe.
But what makes Superunknown such a great guilty pleasure is that its focus isn't entirely on Cornell. Soundgarden's members were all highly -- sometimes insanely -- skilled. Their rhythm section can chew on your teeth and then spit them back at you. Thayil's wrathful axe builds airtight hooks and snakes through effects pedals to produce some downright nasty solos. And the songwriting is of markedly high caliber. It certainly isn't artful or subtle, but there's a reason Superunknown produced three endlessly replayed singles ("Spoonman", "Fell on Black Days" and "Black Hole Sun"): it's pumped so full of memory-hooking riffs that it threatens to burst.
The album's poor production is a right shame -- it obscures the oft-remarkable work beneath each track's towering chords. It's unfair to blame the band for the album's lackluster production; after all, Superunknown was mixed when CDs were still relatively young (Umm... 1993? Early 1994? That's almost ten years after CDs first appeared. I think you're being a little free and easy with the forgiveness there. -- Ed.), and panning effects were to be as innovative as production got. But listen closely and you can make out the athletic bass tumbles between the artful riffs in the title track's second set of hooks. Understated bass work grounds opener "Let Me Drown"'s tense bridge. The multifarious tribal percussion effects in "Spoonman" are swamped in the song's avalanche of guitars and bass, but reveal themselves to be appropriate embellishments in one of the most pagan rock-as-religion tracks in history. And if you can pull yourself away from Thayil's solo, which more or less takes over the song's hungry bridge, the drumming stands out as far more than mere timekeeping; the alternating snare and kick-drum slaps are almost improvisational.
But poor production cannot obscure Superunknown's real muscles: hooks, hooks and more hooks. Opener "Let Me Drown" has three overdriven ones, including its crackling chorus, led by Cornell's unstoppable vocals (Cornell lets out a positively nut-busting, scale-toppling wail at the opening of Thayil's electric cascades). "Fell on Black Days" tosses together two in its verses alone, and drives home a third in its bridge. "The Day I Tried to Live" levels a bass-led hook at your face, then builds upon it with electric guitar flesh and Cornell's range-defying howls. And the chord-heavy minor-key riffs of "Fourth of July" (arguably the album's best cut) are sharply dissonant and dark, yet far catchier than they have a right to be. As much as Thayil is given almost free reign to solo with his wah pedal and virtuosic fret-work, Soundgarden never give in to the impulse to give up songwriting for the sake of The Solo; almost every indulgent freakout is backed up by solid rhythm and riffs and reliable, understated bass work.
The over-length album exposes some poor track-inclusion choices, "Kickstand" being the most prominent waste of riffage. The absurdly over-extended "Just Like Suicide" is a suitably grandiose closer for an unabashedly grandiose album, but it recycles thin ideas for over five minutes before it launches into an anthemic hook, and finally, the longest and most obtrusive wah-solo from Thayil (doesn't Dave Navarro have a patent on these?). And of course, Cornell isn't about to close the album without one more world-flattening scream before the album's melodramatic closing lines: "She lived like a murder, how she'd fly so sweetly / She lived like a murder but she died just like suicide."
Okay, so that's a pretty ridiculous way to close out an album -- but most of Superunknown is well thought-out, closely considered chunks of memorable rock. This hulk of an album proudly displays a band letting loose -- no, thank you, I won't have restraint with that -- with all the primal fury of which rock is capable, a fury we're almost scared of these days. It was certainly Soundgarden's apex (not Badmotorfinger), and as far as the doomed grunge movement was concerned, one of the bangs that it should've gone out with. Even a decade later, it's almost enough to make you forget Audioslave ever existed -- and that's no small feat.
-- Amir Nezar
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