“You can’t go home, no, I swear you never can,” Chris Cornell sings right off the bat: the first words off Soundgarden’s first album since 1996. Honestly? I’m glad we got that out of the way. It had to be on the minds of everyone who flipped their shit when they heard Soundgarden was getting back together. Some of us nervously wondered, “But how’s it gonna be after a sixteen year hiatus?”
2011 was easy for fans; our beloved band packed venues and played all their classic tunes. We didn’t have to grapple with new artistic directions (Timbaland, anyone?) and could just let the old stuff rattle our bones at jet engine levels. Better than going home, it was damn near spiritual hearing all my favorites from Superunknown and Down on the Upside that year at Red Rocks, where the previous October I’d seen Alice in Chains headline the BlackDiamondSkye tour.
Cornell is spot on with that line, though. On a standard five point scale, I give this album a three, and that’s mostly because it’s overshadowed by the two previous records which I’ve been adoring in all their doomy glory for over half my lifetime. The tone and style of this release are much lighter and brighter – to the point where the “grunge” label this band helped create and define barely fits.
Although I find King Animal a less triumphant return than AiC’s Black Gives Way to Blue, it still carries a distinct Soundgarden honesty. The band has never been the type to cater to a specific audience, even if that audience is their old fan base (see: Cornell’s solo career). Soundgarden didn’t recapture their earlier days or even pick up where they left off, and I respect them all the more for not making any pretenses toward such ends.
Maybe that’s the reason I feel so uncharacteristically good in my own skin when listening to Superunknown; stupid shit doesn’t matter in those seventy minutes and the disappointment of not being perfect just dissolves. I may come to feel the same way about King Animal because I think listeners achieve this kind of feeling through music only if the artists themselves live and create through that very attitude. Soundgarden have always been heroes in that respect – nothing’s changed.
Welcome home, everybody.
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“Bones of Birds” is an exception to my “lighter/brighter tone & style” assessment. This track sounds like it was pulled from 1994, but the beauty is that it came from a maturity Chris Cornell didn’t possess until now.
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