In your Jesus Christ POLL: BADMOTORFINGER

Listening to this now on Spotify, rather than digging out the cd, and it just got interrupted by an advert for his new album which apparently includes his "groundbreaking single". How the mighty have fallen.

Are you doing all the Soundgarden albums?

I have some cracking bootlegs on mp3 of early Soundgarden somewhere.

Are you doing all the Soundgarden albums?

Ultramega YouBetcha, though I suspect attendance for the next couple is going to be pretty sparse.

What's in it for me?

Slaves and Bulldozers

top 4 going to get all the votes then?

every song deserves a vote

i actually never quite dug rusty cage. kind of plods a bit for me, and i always found it a bit of an unrepresentative track to start the album. the closing two tracks are actually outstanding - i normally never make it that far, because i'm so comprehensively pummeled by some of the earlier tracks.

voted 'Face Pollution' for the hell of it.

this was my absolute favorite band in the world from '89 to late '91. must have seen them literally 8 or 9 times during that span (in which they toured CONSTANTLY)

disagree about "Rusty Cage" ... being a massive 'Louder Than Love' fan, I had so much anticipation for this album, first time I heard "RC" i got goosebumps: they were actually getting *better*. rest of the album didn't really maintain that level, except for JCP, for me

i'm going to go back and listen to 'louder than love'. seems there's much more to it than i initially tapped found.

anyone hear a prelude to 'fresh tendrils' in 'mind riot'? or a precursor to 'mailman' in 'holy water'?

no but i hear a precursor to 'holy water' in 'incessant mace'...

the song that starts out with "this is a pig" and "this is the sound the devil makes" is also a good one. This whole thing is great, with special mention to "Drawing Flies". I love when the whole band drops out and its just Cornell and the bass. Very nice.

I feel like "Outshined" is not going to do that well. I love that song, though.

we're way too indie around here for Outshined to win this, but it burns... it's between that and Slaves & Bulldozers for me

more badmotorfinger video lulz

it's worth remembering that Soundgarden got their major label deal years before "grunge" broke, and it would be years more still before "stoner" had a section at the record store. A&M was selling them as a straight-up metal act.

yeah i saw Soundgarden on Headbanger's Ball more than 120 Minutes, even after grunge hit, definitely.

the "Outshined" video always reminds me of Beavis & Butthead, who thought the bearded dude was the singer from the Spin Doctors. still a great song, don't think it'll suffer too much in the poll since it's by far the album's biggest hit.

Drawing Flies

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I adored this album when it came out, but I re-visited it again the other day and it didn't retain the same punch for me. Alas.

That all said, I'll go with "Searching with My Good Eye Closed," as Cornell's voice is unstoppable on that one. Shame about that solo career.

Rusty Cage is a great opener and I love that slow middle section. This album trails off pretty quickly for me after the first few songs.

Searching With My Good Eye Closed is a dark horse. Hope it gets more than a couple of votes:

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I feel like "Outshined" is not going to do that well.

whoops

You know an album kicks ass when every single track gets at least two votes.

I was always partial to the Devo cover on SOMMS.

"You know an album kicks ass when every single track gets at least two votes."

truth^

the song that starts out with "this is a pig"

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00004SPXP.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

The "See 'n' Say"! One of my favourite toys as a toddler

You should have photoshopped a picture of Cornell as the farmer

Loud Love poll?

forthcoming... been crazy frazzled with the working

POLL on Kevin's Mom: LOUDER THAN LOVE

woo

finally bought a copy of this on cd after only having a tape for years. it's held up well. I wish stuff like this had mainstream presence nowadays. so creative.

It's exhilirating to hear Cornell utter every verse lyric in "Outshined", with complete and utter conviction.

Funny thing was as a kid, I never really got the 'stoner' connection, but it's clearly there, perhaps moreso than on their later works....

I'm all about Mind Riot at the moment. I think I currently prefer this album to Superunkown - it's dirtier.

Heard this album for the first time in probably 20 years and thought it had aged quite terribly... until I got to side 2.

Searching With My Good Eye Closed -> Room A 1000 Years Wide -> Mind Riot is a killer run.

Sections of Mind Riot reminded me of a Sun City Girls' "Imam" (musically at least)... #seattle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coqxYzKaopc

Would have voted either 'Outshined' or 'Face Pollution'. Still love this album.

Outshined shouldn't have won. I probably would've gone with Mind Riot, the opening build up is genius.

I can't remember what I voted for. "Jesus Christ Pose" and "Face Pollution" are my favourites but I really think the whole album is amazing.

I just put on "Outshined" and remembered one of the things that made this band stand out. Even though I think of this as one of the more standard post-Zep songs, the verses are in 7, which many heavy rock/stoner rock/grunge bands would not even consider doing. Great verse/pre-chorus/two-part-chorus build-up too (and it's still not close to being my favourite!).

There's a great bit in 'Outshined' during the last "show me the power child", where they keep the "outshined! outshined!" rhythm going... puts a bit of an unexpected slant on that part of the song, IMO.

Wow, I just counted the second half of "Rusty Cage": 5 bars of 3 + 1 bar of 4!

I don't know if you'll agree with me on this, Sund4r, but I always felt there was something about Soundgarden's use of odd time signatures and time signature changes that felt incredibly natural. Like, sometimes when I hear pieces of music that utilise time signature changes, I get the impression that the time sig changes have been shoehorned in just for the sake of it, but with a lot of Soundgarden songs it just feels like the riffs actually came out that way without any planning. I'm sure there was some thought put into that stuff, of course, but with this band it just feels like a lot of their stuff was written naturally and just happened to be in an odd time sig or have time sig changes in it, whether they wrote them in consciously or not.

I remember reading an interview with Thayil in which he said half the time they weren't even aware they were using weird time sigs, they just thought it sounded cool.

Slaves and Bulldozers is the jam from this one. the part where he goes from shrilly screaming NOW I KNOW WHY YOU'VE BEEN SHAKING to pulling back into a more Robert Plant vocal in the chorus is just so awes.

I mean, I'm sure that Matt Cameron noticed when he wasn't playing in 4/4 with snare hits on 2 and 4 but I do agree that Soundgarden's time changes or asymmetrical metres flow in a really intuitive way. (I feel the same way about the Beatles' "Blackbird" and Rush's "Limelight", for example.) I get what Thayil meant: he was just trying to write heavy riffs and wasn't deliberately thinking "I want to do something in 7" or "I want to do something in 6-bar phrases with 5 bars of 3 and 1 bar of 4". Those were just the things he did intuitively to write good songs.

What disturbs me is that Wikipedia states that the second part of "Rusty Cage" is in 19/8. Might have to start doing some Wikipedia editing.

Well, 5x3+1x4=19, but I wouldn't notate it as 19/8. Christ.

Well, yeah, that's what I mean. Counting the whole phrase as a single bar of 19 (!) is pretty ridiculous.

That and it doesn't feel like a single bar of 19!

I think this is the record that has by far survived the grunge era the best for me. This and maybe Meantime.

I saw them a few years later with blind melon and neil young (with booker t & the mgs) which is maybe the most wtf 90s lineup I can think of.

Room a Thousand Years Wide is an all-time song

is there really any bad ones on this?

"Searching with my Good Eye Closed" is what they began the first show I saw of theirs with

yes, same for my first soundarden show

such a beast of an opener

this is really the album where Cornell's voice got body to it. his mid-range really became more of a weapon so he wasn't just an air raid siren all of the time. just funny how different he sounded in the early days - like he sounded great, don't get me wrong, but he sometimes lived in the stratosphere ("Nothing to Say", "Beyond the Wheel"), and his mid to lower range wasn't used as well - and the music was a bit noisier, rubbery and less dense idea-wise pre-Shepherd.

here he really added dynamics and become a multi-pronged weapon. some of my favorite vocal performances from him on here.

Mind Riot isn't the greatest song on this necessarily but it's the one I spend the most time thinking about when I'm not listening to the album

I owned it on cassette at first, so I always think of “Rusty Cage” thru “Jesus Christ Pose” as basically one long song.

Mind Riot isn't the greatest song on this necessarily but it's the one I spend the most time thinking about when I'm not listening to the album

― thing that i used to think was cool but now i just don't have time for (stevie),

That build up! It's got a totally mental tuning as well, every string is 'e'.

I really don't think there's a bad song on this.

Mind Riot has one of the nicest melodic riffs on the entire album.

Holy Water is also sinister af

I have a distinct memory of hearing Outshined for the first time on my grandmother’s clock radio and feeling like “Whoa, this is so badass, but also nerdy at the same time! Someone made metal just for me!”

tbc I was like 11 years old

You know an album kicks ass when every single track gets at least two votes.

― butt-rock miyagi (rogermexico.), Sunday, April 5, 2009

as true now as it was then \m/

Tomorrow begat tomorrow...

was this posted?

An Oral History Of Badmotorfinger.
How are you celebrating 30 years of 'Badmotorfinger?' https://t.co/7pph0DA6zd

— Chris Cornell (@chriscornell) October 12, 2021

There’s a picture in there of them at the Lollapalooza show I saw in Chicago. My friends and I had gotten way into the Ohio Players and somehow discovered that Soundgarden had covered “Fopp” which of course we never actually heard because it was a small town in 1992.

Anyway we painted FOPP on a bedsheet and snuck it in and unfurled it in the middle of their set and Chris Cornell started laughing and sang a line from it and we were super stoked.

Later RHCP actually covered it and we thought perhaps we had inspired them to learn it backstage on a whim but it turns out they played it pretty frequently.

Heh, someone posted "Drawing Flies" to a xenharmonic/microtonal FB group I read.