Proper Employment for Chris Cornell

I haven't had a chance to listen to all of these yet because I found them half an hour ago, but some kind soul not only recorded all of the Soundgarden reunion show on April 16, but put all of those recordings up on YouTube. The recording quality is surprisingly excellent and - thus far, at least - the band sounds really, really good: the energy is there, Chris's voice sounds really good, and you get the sense that the venue was rocking out pretty hard. This taste gets me pretty psyched about the concept of a tour. The recording of "Gun" is below; Blabbermouth has the whole set in order.

Chris Anselmo, Singer for Anthrax

Scott Ian described new (or not so new...it's been going on 2 years at this point) Anthrax singer Dan Nelson as sounding like "Chris Cornell singing in Pantera" in an interview with The Quietus.  I'm not entire sure what to do with this information.  It might be because I can't get the image of Chris Cornell singing "Walk" - or its companion, Phil Anselmo singing "Outshined" - out of my head, but that image has pretty much broken my brain for the evening.  I mean, does Ian mean Badmotorfinger-era Cornell?  Or Down On The Upside-era?  Or crappy solo album-era?  Or something later?  I'm so confused...

Getting Psyched for Tyr

The Pagan Knights show - Tyr, Suidakra, and Alestorm - is this Sunday night. I was enthused about the idea of seeing Tyr again when I bought the ticket, but since then I've discovered a few things:

• I like Suidakra's most recent album enough that I'd probably go see them on their own anyway.
  
  
• Tyr is the pagan metal version of Soundgarden: every time I hear something new, it takes me a few listens to get it...and then I slowly grow to love it. It took me 30 minutes into their set last year to grasp where they were going, Eric the Red was a closed book that I only kept trying to reopen because I wanted to translate the magic of the live performance to the recordings, and Land seemed a difficult disappointment until once again something clicked. Now I wake up with "Eric the Red" stuck in my head.
  
  
• Now that I've heard Alestorm, I see how Pagan Knights is trying to be a better, more efficient Paganfest II. Alestorm and their pirate metal takes the place of Swashbuckle and Blackguard, Suidakra has the kind of pop energy to fill the Eluveitie/Korpiklaani portion of the bill, and Tyr's more intellectual focus is a stand in for Moonsorrow and Primordial.

Three more reasons to get psyched for Sunday. I can't wait!

Chris Cornell: Killing His Legacy, One Recording at a Time

I hate to say it, but it might be time for Chris Cornell to call it quits. Doing a lackluster singing job on a live version one of his classic recordings is bad enough, but doing it with Linkin Park - and having Chester Bennington and his flat-featured power whine stand in for Eddie Vedder - is the musical equivalent of ripping up the manuscript of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book you wrote fifteen years ago and using the pages to wipe your dingleberry-covered asshole. And then trying to sell it on eBay afterwards.

Years from now, we'll list Cornell's sellout as a giant amongst the great attempts, putting the hit-seeking ways of Metallica and Dave Mustaine to shame. Ass.

Fuck it, I'm not even sure I'd want to see a Soundgarden review now.

I [Heart] Soundgarden...For Historical Reasons

Was breezing through the latest post on the Lefsetz Letter when I spotted a section called "Like Suicide." Since I've loved the word to music association game since high school like a fat kid loves cake, I jumped to the first reference that came to my head: "Like Suicide," the track from Superunknown. Turns out Bob and I were on the same page, because he was writing about the same song, how he'd just heard it for the first time because he'd given up on Soundgarden after Loud Love. How the song struck him like "Rooster," but not quite as strong.

What he said made me laugh for a few reasons. First: When I was in college, a friend of mine from high school IMed me. He was trying to convince his girlfriend at the time to give Alice in Chains another shot by making her a mix and wanted to know what song I thought he should leave out. "Rooster," I said. "It's their weakest song." I'm not sure I'd say the same today - the end of Facelift, for example, falls a little flat on the promise offered by the album's opening tracks - but in a list of favorites by AiC, "Rooster" still wouldn't come out on top.

Second: I bought Superunknown when it came out in 1994; when "Spoonman" and "Black Hole Sun" were in heavy rotation on the local rock radio stations. I was thirteen; I was not particularly sophisticated in my musical tastes. I didn't get the album at all; I remember wanting to skip "Superunknown" and "Head Down" (sacrilege for me; any album in the trial phase of new ownership should never have a track skipped and any album worthy of ownership should not have a track bad enough to need skipping. I have very weird standards when it comes to music) so I could get to the singles and get back to familiar ground.

Flash forward two years later. I start hanging out with that same friend who later asked me for mix CD advice. That friend loves Soundgarden; has all of their albums, comes up with theories about how the band changed after Hiro Yamamoto left, how "Hands All Over" is about arms limitations and "Superunknown" is about the experience of seeing Soundgarden live, thinks "Circle of Power" is one of the purest expressions of the rock 'n roll spirit ever recorded. Crazy, beautiful stuff that makes me dig deeper, see the band in a new light, fall in love with their sounds. I fill out my collection, put "4th of July" on a mix tape because it's the heaviest thing I've heard thus far. After we get our licenses, we drive around singing along to songs like "The Day I Tried to Live," "Fresh Tendrils," "Power Trip," and "Like Suicide," the ultimate bottom-heavy downer of an album closer. Soundgarden's music became an indelible part of my adolescence, so it's a little funny for me to read about someone much older than me discovering them for the first time. How could they miss something that good?

When New Knowledge Comes...

When I was in college, I did my best to form bands. It was not a particularly successful exercise, for a multitude of reasons - the college's lack of practice spaces, the limited number of musicians who were neither jam-band loving hippies or too-cool-for-rock jazz freaks, the flakiness of those I did meeting, my (in retrospect) inability to play either guitar or sing particularly well - but it did prove instructive, and contributed to my eventually moving to New York. The reason I bring this up: one of my more successful attempts at band forming occurred when I was sophomore, and met a drummer named Eric.

Eric was perfect for what I was looking for: he was an excellent drummer, liked similar music, and had a kit in his dorm room, which he'd somehow been able to play without causing firestorms on the other sides of the thin dorm walls. We met early in the Fall 2000 semester - which might explain his drumming in the dorm success - and I brought my stuff over to his room, where we jammed and we talked. This happened to be not long after I had seen Pearl Jam for the first time, and I was high on the band and all of their albums for the first time in four or five years. Eric happened to have gone to a show on the same tour, but his reasons for going had entirely to do with Matt Cameron, the ex-Soundgarden drummer who'd joined Pearl Jam for Binaural. Eric thought Cameron was one of God's gifts to drumming, and he'd gone to the show - even though he didn't particularly like Pearl Jam - just to see him live.

Ever since that day, I've listened a little closer to the drumming Matt did on Soundgarden's albums, and sometimes I dig far enough down through Chris Cornell's magnetic voice and mind-bending lyrics, through Kim Thayil's discordant power riffing, to get a sense of the deeper layers that make those songs really work. This morning, Badmotorfinger came on my iPod, and I got that sense again, diving through the sounds of "Jesus Christ Pose," prying apart the surface and diving to the chugging of Ben Shepard's bass, playing the same main riff through so much of the song, staying steady and true whether Kim joins him, plays a bridge, or just freaks out. Realizing in the process that Soundgarden was so good on Badmotorfinger and Superunknown that they could have the bass player keeping time and the songs still flow so well that you don't know that Matt's playing some mishmash of polyrhythms unless you listen for it. The 1 is in there somewhere, but Matt'll never tell you where - you just have to feel for it. And when you do feel it, and you know you're feeling it, you feel really good.