Soundgarden

Bones Of Birds off King Animal is such a fantastic song, about how you can't protect your kids from losing their innocence

The second half of Down On The Upside drags a bit (or more to the point there's a big sag in the middle) but the opening seven tracks or so are so great that I'll forgive a lot of what comes afterwards.

Down On The Upside is one of the prototypical "too long" albums. If it was 45 minutes it would be considered a classic.

"Non-State Actor" on King Animal is such a "Soundgarden song title", I'm not really able to fully articulate this thought but they had very distinctive song title aesthetics

everything on down on the upside is great but the pacing is terrible. sort of the opposite of superunknown, which is 70 minutes long but every song seems to build on the previous in this really captivating way

I would def listen to a brad-sequenced DOtU

yeah brad u should do that on spotify...

also I had a !!!!! moment when I listened to Louder Than Love....the origin of the James Hetfields "Ye-AH!" OMG at the beginning of "Gun"

srsly though this def sounds like a template of sorts for Black Album and 90s Metallica...I haven't heard them address Soundgarden iirc but Soundgarden def was the grunge band that got respek on their name in metal circles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKSBK-aUKp4

Friends and I saw them on the Upside tour and it definitely felt deflated, like the band had lost some of its will, in contrast to two years earlier when we saw them with NIN at the height of their fame. I wasn't surprised when they disbanded shortly afterward.

As someone who loved Soundgarden in high school but didn't pay much attention to the lyrics aside from the odd cool-sounding phrase or image, it's terribly sad to read through them now in light of the illness he was obviously struggling with his whole life.

tbh i have no idea how i would resequence down on the upside, feel like the band did the best they could with the material

"Non-State Actor" on King Animal is such a "Soundgarden song title", I'm not really able to fully articulate this thought but they had very distinctive song title aesthetics

Incredibly true. They managed an insanely great trick of song titles that weren't entirely po-faced or straightforward, but weren't 'funny' either. More like this captivating blunt wryness that seemed to float in its own zone.

http://pitchfork.com/news/73603-soundgardens-chris-cornells-family-questions-cause-of-death/

from familial experience Ativan can be a motherfucker of a drug

it's such a weird set of songs

xxp

Maura did the man justice, of course.

http://pitchfork.com/features/afterword/10080-why-soundgardens-chris-cornell-was-more-than-just-a-grunge-frontman/

I realize "4th of July" was about a Cornell acid trip but its lyrics are so vague even they seem extra sad to me now.

― Charles "Butt" Stanton (Neanderthal), Friday, May 19, 2017 8:18 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i used this song for a high school english project as an example of poetry in music. i think i said it was about the apocalypse or something

i also used a lyric from "limo wreck" as my senior quote lol

it does feel apocalyptic, doesn't it.

I love Limo Wreck

"Non-State Actor" on King Animal is such a "Soundgarden song title", I'm not really able to fully articulate this thought but they had very distinctive song title aesthetics
Incredibly true. They managed an insanely great trick of song titles that weren't entirely po-faced or straightforward, but weren't 'funny' either. More like this captivating blunt wryness that seemed to float in its own zone.

Yeah IMO they have the best song titles. Loud love! Slaves and bulldozers! Breaking the wheel! A room a thousand years wide! Jesus Christ pose! Omg so cool.

i know i've said this on multiple soundgarden threads but.... man, king animal is very good

that could be the tape he made in character for SINGLES, which is coming out as part of its deluxe reissue tomorrow

― maura, Thursday, May 18, 2017 12:41 PM (yesterday)

I just listened to the tracks from that but I think those sound a little more polished and full formed, the songs I remember were more rough, rustic and witchy... more songs in the vein of "Seasons" than "Spoonman".

That said, I couldn't find the Poncier version of "Seasons" but I could find every other Poncier song on the 'tube.

Michael Beinhorn is the producer in the infamous Hole drummer story btw, despite having been in material he seems to have been the epitome of the interventionist label producer

― fish louse (Jon not Jon), Thursday, May 18, 2017 9:06 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok. while reading the oral history i wasn't sure who to give the benefit of the doubt to, now i know it certainly wasn't this prick

yeah beinhorn is a major piece of shit though he's semi-responsible for two of my favorite rock productions of the '90s (superunknown and celebrity skin, superunknown obv was the band in contention with beinhorn where celebrity skin is a way sadder story)

this is my current fav jam from king animal

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

also i've been listening to cornell's obligatory beatlesesque song from that record and uh crying a lot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxYCQJW89Wc

Beinhorn's other major 90s accomplishment -- Marilyn Manson's best album, Mechanical Animals.

oh yep ^^^^

Maybe this is all going to be obvious, but revisiting Badmotorfinger for the first time in a while I'm struck by how much of a bluesy riff rock/early metal record it is at bottom, with what seems like a lot of influence from Sabbath, Zeppelin, Motörhead, Priest. That and also just what a fucking weird and great song Rusty Cage is musically.

Really liked Maura's piece, but I'm curious why it skips over Audioslave completely.

i only had so much time alas

that's for when tom morello dies

Re man alive's comment: the thing about that (and the band, but taking Badmotorfinger as its own example) is that it simultaneously is and isn't as you describe. Which is part of why it resonates and works. I forget which edition of the Trouser Press guide said this about Soundgarden but per your point they said they called back to that protometal era of 'shirtless men singing about shirtless women.' But the whole point was that they didn't do that, at least not as some sort of raison d'etre -- and while they avoided Zep-style pseudohistorical narratives, they weren't Sabbath's bummer fantasies either. It was more like one foot in the 'real' world, one foot elsewhere, with everything refracted, kaleidoscopic. Per Jon's story above, it was like capturing something miasmic, in the air. It could be focused when needed, it could be overtly funny, but even so. And musically it took all you described and twisted it in knots -- compressed, encircled, but just as thorny as the lyrics could be. They could and did go big and slow but always felt like they were a Titan tied down, intentionally, as an aesthetic point. It was music for stomping all around the world, but caught in unavoidable and inevitable frustration, not triumph. "Rusty Cage" may be the great outlier -- it starts an album with escape and release but it ends with "New Damage," where you have to get out for much bigger reasons, and you might not be able to.

Is there any other massive early 90s rock record with as much going on rhythmically as Spoonman? I just listened again and it's astonishing how much it works into a big, anthemic, MTV-friendly rock song. And it's doubly astonishing that I didn't really notice all that at the time.

yes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-pkDd5epgk

had a lovely surprise this morning. put on Euphoria Morning to listen to on the drive to work and got an immediate, vivid flashback as Cant Change Me started

In 1999 i travelled to the US & met Mr Veg for the first time. We took a road trip to SF, Santa Cruz, LA and Vegas & I had completely forgotten til now that Euphoria Morning was one of the cds in the changer!

We must have spun it a lot on that trip because it was all i could think of the whole time I was listening to it.... visions of our various stops & the landscapes rushing by and all our dumb injokes from that trip

It was such a happy memory, felt like a great bonus putting this album on expecting to cry a lot and instead smiling happily & singing along

It's such a beautiful album, I def am going to try to keep it in the rotation for a while.

i slept on Cornell's solo career completely. I should probably pick up Euphoria Morning. How's Higher Truth?

I just learned that he rereleased Euphoria Morning in 2015, retitling it Euphoria Mourning.

Euphoria Morning was recently re-released on vinyl, but you’ve changed the title to what you’d originally intended it to be – Euphoria Mourning. How did it come to be spelt differently on the original release?
It was a pretty dark album lyrically and pretty depressing, and I was going through a really difficult time in my life – my band wasn’t together anymore, my marriage was falling apart and I was dealing with it by drinking way too much, and that has its own problems, particularly with depression. So I titled the album Euphoria Mourning, but right before the record came out and I was doing interviews over the radio for example, if you say “Euphoria Mourning”, the listener doesn’t know if it’s mourning with a “u” or morning without a “u”. And that started to bother me. So I had a conversation with my manager at the time, and said I really love the title but do you think it’s confusing? And he suggested that Euphoria Morning would probably be a better title. I thought, in contrast to the lyrics maybe that works. And it wasn’t my manager’s fault, I was a grown man and could say I don’t think that’s a good idea, and in the back of my mind I didn’t think it was a good idea. But mentally I wasn’t together enough to really know what was right. So I went with “Morning”, and it’s bothered me ever since. It even showed up in an early review where someone reviewing the record said that the title sounded like a potpourri scent, and when I read that I was just like [with disdain], “Fuck! Fuckin’ bullshit!” The title was so beautifully poetic to begin with, just the concept of euphoria in mourning; it was a moment I felt inspired and I let all the air out of it. So when we decided to do its first vinyl release I thought, I want to change the fuckin’ title! [Laughs] It’s time to change it.

Did Cornell and David Tibet do something together at one point? I have it in my head that they did but google did not turn up anything

Burying Artis in the mix on Spoonman was dumb.

Been incredibly busy for the last couple of days so only just heard about this. Absolutely shocked. RIP.

xxp you're thinking of andrew wk?

it just gets more & more grim

http://www.spin.com/2017/05/chris-cornell-police-report-death-details/

Burying Artis in the mix on Spoonman was dumb.

This is my one criticism.

just over an hour ago i got the tip off : i am neighbour free all weekend.
now, i aint a full on audiophile freak,
but my midrange floorstanders can make a noise that is rather glorious when given the chance.
and yeah, i know it's not the choice of heroes,
but the first audioslave album is sounding insanely good at the moment.
i will of course do the soundgarden groove at some point.
however, despite the backing band, the vocals ..
well, i don't need to say anymore.

crank it! :D

Euphoria mourning though

thats the one ive been re-visiting the most since the news.

The verb I mean. Or is it still a noun

"Preaching the end of the world" is one I'm afraid to listen to cos idk if I can do the emotions that come w/ that song right now

"follow my way" too

My Wave is great turned up, that one and S-Unknown were the perfect soundtrack to a fucked spring break trip

"Preaching the end of the world" is one I'm afraid to listen to cos idk if I can do the emotions that come w/ that song right now

― Charles "Butt" Stanton (Neanderthal), Friday, May 19, 2017 3:31 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this is the one that got me yesterday