335: Soundgarden — Superunknown (A&M, 1994)

Overall rating: 4

Level of Prior Familiarity: 5

How I Listened: Amazon Music + Spotify, first at home on my Echo, then in my car, then at the office

So don’t you lock up something
That you wanted to see fly
– From the song “Fell On Black Days”

Somewhere high up in the woody mountains of Washington a sculptor is blasting a rock face with dynamite, carving busts of the four unmistakable voices of 90s Seattle: Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder, Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell. How one city could produce four such distinct and remarkable voices in such a short period of time can only be chalked up to coincidence, I think. But their contributions to music most certainly deserve to be set in stone.

It was with great sadness that we learned this morning of the passing of Chris Cornell, leaving just one living face on that great Seattle Rushmore.

As a teenager, I first heard Soundgarden on MTV, where the video for “Spoonman” had me asking what band in their right mind would lead off their album cycle with a hard rock song featuring a madman playing a solo on spoons.

And they followed it up with — count ’em — four more singles from this album, including the gigantic hit “Black Hole Sun,” with one of the most iconic music videos of all time.

For me, this band has two parts: the stellar voice of Chris Cornell, and the stylistically unmatched guitar playing of Kim Thayil. Where Cornell’s vocals defined the songs, Thayil’s guitar riffing defined the sound of this band. Don’t get me wrong, I’d rather never heard another Kim Thayil guitar solo every again (his soloing is the very definition of mindless noodling). Still, his tone and his riffs and his reinvention of what rock guitar can sound like made this album not just memorable, but influential beyond its brief moment in grunge history.

What makes Superunknown (and every other great grunge album of this period) so perfect, though, are the songs. And for that we can thank Cornell, who penned most of the songs on this record, or co-wrote them with the various band members. His meandering, often nonsensical lyrics left my teenage mind reeling (“Stuttering, cold and damp/Steal the warm wind tired friend/Times are gone for honest men/And sometimes far too long for snakes” …. what the fuck does that mean??). Couple this with the heavy riffing, that thick grunge distortion, and the thundering drums and its really no wonder Soundgarden remains one of the most important bands from one of the most important genre shifts in music history.

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