Soundgarden
Superunknown
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Soundgarden
Superunknown
A&M, 1994
RiYL: Pearl Jam, Black Sabbath, Queens Of The Stone Age |
It doesn't hurt that I started high school in 1994, which was a pretty great year for music. Pick your genre, '94 had it all. It was the year of Beck, the Digable Planets, Sunny Day Real Estate, the latest and greatest R.E.M. comeback, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy, Tori Amos's best album, the Beasties' "Sabotage" video and even Ween's Chocolate & Cheese.
I wasn't hip to them at the time, but 1994 was also the year that both Tortoise and The Sea & Cake made their first records and Jawbox made their best one. It was also the year I first realized that it was extremely important to have an opinion on what the greatest rock and roll record album of all time was, and that you could tell all you needed to know about a person by what their take on this crucial question was.
Thankfully, 1994 also produced two candidates for that crown that still hold up today: Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Guided By Voices' Bee Thousand. It was a few years until I become completely obsessed, but 1994 was also the year I first started listening to Elvis Costello, who then put out Brutal Youth, which was at that time his best record in quite a while.
The album I always forget when I get into conversations about the sublime nature of that year is, oddly, the album I probably listened to more that year than all of the above combined. Time has not been terribly kind to Soundgarden in general and Superunknown in particular.
Part of the reason for that is what we know about their ultimate fate. After Superunknown, which was a colossal hit, Soundgarden made one more record, 1996's Down on the Upside, which was not so much bad as completely unnecessary. Apparently the band had enough creative juice in it to make a complete 180 successfully from the sporadically engaging meta-metal Badmotorfinger, but not enough to sustain the new direction across two overlong albums.
Unlike, say, Green Day (and did I mention what year Dookie came out?) Soundgarden didn't stick around long enough after its big breakthrough disc to prove there was more to them than that one big LP. But they weren't spared an ugly aftermath, either. Chris Cornell made a boring solo album and then made an entirely financially motivated decision to join with Tom Morello in Audioslave, a band which somehow manages to recall all of the worst excesses of both Soundgarden and Rage Against the Machine and none of their many good elements. Matt Cameron joined Pearl Jam right around the time I gave up on Pearl Jam, becoming only about the fourth consecutive PJ drummer to be described in interviews with Jeff Ament as "really the drummer we always wanted to play with." The other two guys? Well, you tell me.
Superunknown sure sounded great in the context of the times, however. A lot of criticisms you can lay at Soundgarden's door nowadays were downright strengths a decade ago. It's true that Superunknown sounded nothing like its predecessors, but everybody was doing that in '94. Of course the reason Experimental Jet Set, Trash And No Star sounds nothing like Dirty isn't really the same thing at all, but I didn't know that when I was 14. But remember the era. All over the world, bands that would have called themselves metal in '91 were changing their haircuts and switching to far looser pants.
Compared to bands like Candlebox, Stone Temple Pilots, or Dig, Soundgarden dripped cred. And accusing them of trying to ride the crest of Nirvana's wave is poor history. If anything, Superunknown merely dialed back the heavy Black Sabbath obsession of the band's formative years and crossed over into Led Zep territory. They weren't the first to do so and it hardly puts them in shameful company. Well, Cornell should be a little ashamed for so brazenly ripping off "Misty Mountain Hop" for the album's title track.
Mostly, though, Superunknown holds up. The musical differences from Badmotorfinger are extremely striking, but the difference in Cornell's lyrical approach as well somewhat suggests that the band was merely following its muse rather than any sort of platinum sales siren song. What is interesting is that the direction suggested by the "poppy" side of the Soundgarden of old, seen in glimpses here and there in tracks like "Somewhere," isn't so much picked up on Superunknown as a third way. This album drops for the most part both the complex riffs and mathy time signatures of midperiod Soundgarden and the fuzzed-out punk/power-pop inflection of their early Sub Pop singles. What Superunknown resembles most is classic rock, only redirected by a producer, Michael Beinhorn, who had heard and absorbed what Butch Vig did with Nevermind.
It doesn't help our collective memories of Superunknown that "Black Hole Sun" was the inescapable hit. The song is too long, lyrically opaque, and just kind of not good. Morevover, it's overly reliant on Cornell's go-to technique of trying to invest shoddy lyrics with import by oversinging the hell out of them. The other big singles, "The Day I Tried To Live" and "Fell On Black Days," have held up much better.
Every player in the band benefits from the album's overall less-is-more theme, and guitarist Kim Thayil's judicious picking of spots lets the Cameron/Ben Shepherd rhythm section do what they do best, which is underplay. Singer Cornell also gives subtlety a try, not shouting every word and shedding his fixation on oversized, Gothic metaphors for more sturdy personal reflections.
A few tracks backslide into Soundgarden's old sludgy bad habits ("Mailman," "Limo Wreck") but there's really no precedent for the success of the psychedelic "Head Down" or the mindless riff-shaker "Spoonman." Fifteen tracks is about four too many, as even the new-look Soundgarden only has so many directions they can go. "My Wave" and "Let Me Drown" are sort of replicative, as are "4th Of July" and "Like Suicide." A couple of the "let's let the rhythm section write a song" selections are wastes of space, and the "let's go back to our punk roots" tune "Kickstand" is a bit silly given that Soundgarden were never punks. Nonetheless the overall blend of Cornell's newfound songwriting immediacy, the yeoman's work done by Cameron/Shepherd, and Thayil's well-parceled-out guitar explosions make for a record that's easily Soundgarden's best, although hardly the greatest of 1994.
Knowing what I know now about music, it lacks the same impact, but it would be unfair to forget the impact the album had at the time. After Nirvana imploded and Pearl Jam waved the white flag when it came to fame, the grunge movement could have gone down in history mostly for subjecting us to a four-year period where mainstream rock music sucked hard -- I'm looking at you, Bush and Collective Soul. Soundgarden didn't suck, and they didn't sound exactly like Nirvana either, and for that they deserve to be remembered. I know they're kind of crowded out by all of the other tectonic musical advances of 1994 (the year They Might Be Giants finally caved in and hired a real drummer!), but let's try and make room.
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.