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Soundgarden’s Superunknown is getting a re-release this year. I love pretty much everything associated with grunge (even Silverchair), but Superunknown is the peak of this vague and patchwork genre to me. It’s an absolutely colossal album, it is just absolutely huge to the point of being apocalyptic. It bridged a gap perfectly for me between this loosely-held together grunge genre and stuff like Kyuss, as well as harkening back to my first musical love in Black Sabbath. I love Superunknown.
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Mar 29, 2014 03:00
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Cheesus posted:Grunge also rode the steady wave of success from 80s alternative groups such as Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane's Addiction, the Pixies, etc. i just wish they were doing it for Badmotorfinger too, no one ever talks about how excellent that album is.
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Apr 1, 2014 16:53
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hatelull posted:Which is criminal because "Slaves & Bulldozers" is such an amazing blistering song, and easily my favorite Soundgarden track. The whole album has this amazingly catastrophic sound. It’s like Badmotorfinger is the score to the end of the world and Superunknown is the aftermath. I listened to Pearl Jam’s Ten the other day for the first time in ages and remembered how good it is. Despite some dodgy lyrics it’s really consistent and has a great texture to it. I think my favourite will always be Vitalogy, which is probably their closest to having a sound people typically associate with the word ‘grunge’.
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Apr 4, 2014 19:52
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shmee posted:Eddie doesn't do this sort of thing much any more does he? Now he just chugs a bottle of wine and busts out Tom Waits covers.
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Apr 5, 2014 02:52
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Bulging Nipples posted:One of the things I feel that gets overlooked a little when discussing some of the bigger grunge bands is the sheer ridiculous quality of the vocalists; Chris Cornell, Lane Staley, and Mark Lanegan in particular are just insanely good singers and Kurt Cobain was just raw and amazing as well. Some of these absolutely gorgeous voices singing these tortured songs was just something very genre bending and really, really special. Layne Staley had the most incredible voice, even though Alice in Chains aren’t my absolute favourite of the grunge bands he’s my favourite vocalist. He just sounds so unbelievably tortured and agonised. He could swing from soft and mournful to sounding like a diseased air raid siren. His harmonising with Jerry Cantrell was often gorgeous. Alice in Chains were an essential part of that scene. It was mentioned earlier that Guns N Roses were huge at the time - Guns N Roses were the party, with all the booze, unprotected sex and drugs it involved, whereas Alice in Chains sounded like the disease-ridden, hungover, jonesing aftermath. I’d be interested to know what people think of Stone Temple Pilots. They’re often labelled as pretenders of the genre, and Core certainly ripped off a whole shitload of different bands at the time (and as such it’s my least favourite of their albums aside from a few standout tracks), but I felt like they got better and better as they went on and started doing their own thing. Not that they ever stopped openly wearing their influences on their sleeve. Also Scott Weiland is the most hilarious mess of a human being.
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Apr 5, 2014 17:08
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Purple is a great album but my favourite is Tiny Music...Tales from the Vatican Gift Shop. That was when they really started to move away from the grunge association,
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Apr 6, 2014 03:11
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david_a posted:Is early Smashing Pumpkins considered grunge? I'm not sure what the accepted limits of the genre are. I was about to ask the same thing. I’d certainly say the first three albums fall into the really broad category that grunge seems to be, at least stylistically. Siamese Dream is also loving great. As for Stone Temple Pilots they’ve become more and more straight-up pop rock in recent years and I have no problem with it. I really liked the EP with Chester Bennington and I bloody hate Linkin Park. david_a posted:I got into a nostalgia trip for music from this era that I didn't necessarily like at the time and picked up some Screaming Trees a while back. I really like Sweet Oblivion, but what happened on Dust? All the religious stuff seemingly came out of nowhere. I think Lanegan found God somewhere. The last Mark Lanegan Band album is loaded with it too.
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Apr 8, 2014 23:00
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Fenrir posted:Whether or not you like Linkin Park, Bennington can definitely sing, and his voice does suit the band a LOT better than I thought it would. I was pretty much sold the first time I heard him sing Dead & Bloated. I won’t pretend my prejudice wasn’t entirely based on my dislike of Linkin Park, but I was converted as soon as I heard Out of Time and immediately went looking for them doing the old stuff on YouTube. Fenrir posted:e: Holy poo poo how did I not notice before... There was Soundgarden chat and THIS wasn't posted? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRQCtFotgSU Even now sometimes I hear Chris Cornell’s voice and think ‘holy poo poo.’
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Apr 9, 2014 18:24
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Dirt posted:Also the album art is rad, and was drawn by Layne Staley: I love this album. The first time I heard it I was 18 and a really rough personal place and it’s stuck with me forever. I don’t listen to it often because it’s actually kind of hard to, but the fact that it has that kind of influence on me even all these years later really says something about it. Mark Lanegan’s album with Duke Garwood that came out sometime last year is great too.
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Apr 10, 2014 21:35
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Since Out of Time has been discussed and STP aren’t really part of the scene, what are people’s thoughts on the latest efforts from the remaining three of the biggest four bands of the genre? Pearl Jam seem to have really rejuvenated their love of music in the last few years. They really sounded like they were winding down with Binaural and Riot Act, then the self-titled album suddenly had all this energy that they appear to be maintaining. They’ve really embraced their status as a big stadium act and I liked Lightning Bolt a lot, probably more than Backspacer, despite the lame album title. Soundgarden surprised me with the quality of King Animal. Despite what I’d say are dud tracks (Attrition, Worse Dreams, Eyelid’s Mouth) it’s tighter and ballsier than Down on the Upside was, but doesn’t have the vast expanse that Badmotorfinger and Superunknown had. They make decent use of Chris Cornell’s rougher, older voice - I really like the awful crack he does on the chorus of By Crooked Steps (which should have been the title of the album). Alice in Chains last couple of albums I...don’t really know. I thought Black Gives Way to Blue was patchy with a few really good songs (especially the title song). Devil Put Dinosaurs here is more consistent but way too long and I really wish Cantrell would let Duvall actually be the singer for more than like two songs.
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Apr 11, 2014 23:43
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Why the hell doesn’t Jerry Cantrell just make mournful acoustic music? That’s what he’s best at, especially now. I want another Jar of Flies.Curl_like_smoke posted:King Animal was pretty good but for me it was missing that big, aggressive, stomp your feet track like 4th of July or Slaves and Bulldozers. I It was Soundgarden but with the pop sensibilities that Cornell retained from Audioslave and doing a Bond theme. It wasn’t bad but it was lacking that genuinely dark, depressive edge. Crackerman fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Apr 12, 2014 |
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Apr 12, 2014 01:33
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Fenrir posted:e: Also, I see that the Mad Season album is getting a whole lot of love in here. I never actually listened to it, I just remember that lovely song they used to play on MTV all the time (E: Apparently it was called River of Deceit) and thought I'd never like the album. Does it get better than that? It’s arguably the peak of the genre along with Superunknown. Give it a chance.
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Apr 12, 2014 03:56
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River of Deceit is the softest song on there. The rest of it is Layne Staley’s ghost haunting your broken head.
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Apr 12, 2014 04:13
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Fenrir posted:I can't even get through the first song, this is horrible. I guess I'd have to either be 10 years younger or just ... gently caress, I don't know. This sounds really bad. Why is this album considered so amazing? If it doesn’t then it doesn’t. When I call it the peak of the genre that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for everyone, just that it captures the feel and the atmosphere that people considered ‘grunge’ or ‘90s alternative’ or whatever. In a way that could tip it into parody if you’re not in the right mindset/of the right age that it speaks to you.
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Apr 12, 2014 04:30
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MentholsNBeer posted:Speaking of that dark, depressive edge... Along with Tighter and Tighter and Overfloater Applebite is my favourite song from Down on the Upside. It’s the weakest of their three 90s albums but it still has a lot going for it, and it’s got a really deep, bleak, atmospheric sound the further in it gets. It was actually a good ending for their career in an “always go out on your back” kind of way, but I’m still glad they’re still recording. I’ve never gotten into Nirvana either. I discovered the scene when I was 17 after years of being a metalhead before stumbling on Pearl Jam. I went from them, to Alice in Chains to Soundgarden, then STP and Smashing Pumpkins, Faith No More and spanning out into all kinds of 90s alt rock like stoner stuff and whatever else, but Nirvana just never struck a chord with me. I have no idea why not to this day.
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Apr 12, 2014 19:02
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Just a heads-up: the new remaster of Superunknown sounds like listening to the original CD on a 1996 portable CD player with the bass boost on through £7.99 headphones.
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Jun 6, 2014 18:02
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Why couldn’t they do what they did with Ten a few years ago? That was a great set.
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Jun 6, 2014 23:43
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If there was any album I own that I thought didn’t need a remaster it was Superunknown but I was really curious. Nope, ruined.
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Jun 7, 2014 03:45
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I only have the single CD version. I was also hoping it’d come in a nice digi-pack or something but no. Looks like I’m sticking to my original CD. As an aside though, it’s reminded me how much I love Superunknown, it’s a phenomenal album.
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Jun 7, 2014 17:40
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