Pistols at dawn!
Smashing Pumpkins, being a local band, was a huge deal. Rush is amazing, and their work from '74-'84 remains one of the best 10 years by any band. How dare you insult the genius of Geddy Lee (and Neil Peart, one of the best living drummers)
Zepplin I like, but not in the way some others do. They are good, but a bit too (very good) straightforward rock for my personal taste. Achilles Last Stand is a great song though.
I was going to write a lengthy reply but figured this wasn’t the place. Anyway, as I said, they’re bands that all have greatness and they’re also bands I don’t enjoy listening to. They can be two things.
He, fair enough. Please don’t think my post was anything other than joking among friends. There are plenty of other ‘greats’ I can’t stand, and more than one great band has been thrown for my by a singer I have an aversion to. You just picked two pretty foundational bands for me, and one I think is pretty ok, so hence the faux fainting couch reply.
Back to the topic at hand I did listen to Badmotorfinger yesterday, as well as Superunknown. Both are great, but I still like Superunknown far better.
Superunknown is a case where a band’s “popular” record is also its best.
I agree completely.
No, it’s fine, I’ve got pretty thick Internet skin and I love a good argument, I just am trying to curb my thread derailing tendencies (for once).
Anyway, I must admit I haven’t listened to Soundgarden much lately but they’ve been all over the radio - naturally enough, since I’m in Seattle. Anecdotally, while I never met him personally, I’m told he worked in a coffee shop in my neighborhood back in the day and was always really friendly.
Also the rare case where a band’s"popular" album happens to be it’s most complex and adventurous. I keep seeing the words “psychedelic” in that album’s many reviews but clearly they were also in prog-rock or prog-metal territory. Love that album.
Smashing Pumpkin were pretty good up until Mellon Collie and the Infinite Ego. 26 song double album that had it been a 10 song album would have been a worthy follow-up to Siamese Dream because there were some excellent songs on there (Bullet With Butterfly Wings was NOT one of them).
Agree about the somewhat silly lyrics but I really listened to them mostly because of Chamberlain’s fluid drumming and those great solos Corgan played…which were a nice combination of Alex Lifeson and Jimi Hendrix (very melodic but edgy). Corgan’s voice could grate and had very little range, the bass playing was solid at best.
Amusing that you put popular in quotes instead of best.
Yes! No exception to the “double albums are really just poorly edited single albums” rule, but there is some good stuff on there.
Heh. You could argue it from either direction, true. I was just trying to forestall arguments over the minutiae of “popular” with the scare quotes.
About the biggest exception IMO is Ayreon. Every one, almost, is a double album, and every one is stellar.
Mellon Collie has a bunch of filler.
It was April 30, 1992 at The Unicorn in Houston and despite Ten being the hottest thing out, Pearl Jam still drew opening spot to Soundgarden. Eddie Vedder was such a wanker. The other two opening bands were Monster Magnet in the 1st spot and Swervedriver in the 2nd. One of my most memorable shows of all time.
During the song “Beyond the Wheel” someone gets on stage and basically mugs Cornell. Cornell never misses a note of the song despite being in a wrestling match. From my spot behind the pit , I can’t even see Cornell but he is belting out the high parts of the song without faltering. The guy isn’t assaulting him but is just “on” him. Somewhere around 2 minutes in, Cornell finally gets to his feet and the guy has a scissor lock around Cornell’s waist and Cornell has a mic in one hand and a handful of the dude’s underwear in the other… I’m talking massive wedgie. The crowd is finally able to do what the stage security is unable to do and drags the dude back into the pit. When the song is over Cornell says “Damn, who was that friendly hormone?”
This comment got me thinking about this album, so I am listening to it again and it’s just a joy. It’s been too long.
I’m definitely a fan of all of their albums (ALL OF THEM…Soundgarden was my band), but to me, Superunknown is the beginning of their cleaner MTV-friendly phase.
Louder than Love is my favorite though. One of the rawest hard rock albums of all time. I still haven’t figured out what Full On Kevin’s Mom is about.
Almost reads like: they sold out. Superunknown is experimental, but still a very heavy rocking album. It felt more like a natural progression from Badmotorfinger. Their potential fully realized.
The popularity of the whole GRUNGE scene just made it so MTV was then open to playing stuff that would never have been played outside of their late night 120 minutes or Headbangers Ball or whatever it was called. It wasn’t Soundgarden becoming MTV friendly, it was MTV becoming Soundgarden friendly. I remember Alice In Chains also getting a lot of airplay on MTV…and that Dirt album isn’t exactly easy listening (that is one dark album, thematically and musically).
Now, Metallica going from …And Justice For All to that horrible "Black Album was definitely them trying to be radio-friendly.
But it doesn’t. I made sure not to say that because I never believed it. If you want a “sold out” Chris Cornell, listen to Audioslave.
Hell, it was probably ME becoming more MTV-friendly. I had to grow up a lot between 1990 and 1994. I went through a hairy divorce (1992) and was coming out the other side. I spent a little time in jail (no felonies). I cut my hair to get a job.
But let’s ask the man himself:
What did that period feel like to you then?
At the time, at least for me personally, it was a time filled with a tremendous amount of responsibility and pressure to prove who we were. We wanted to show that we stood alone and outside of what was becoming a convenient geographic group that we were inside. I never felt bad about being lumped in with other Seattle bands. I thought it was great. But I also felt like all of us were going to have to prove that we could also exist with autonomy, and we deserved to be playing on an international stage, and we deserved to have videos on TV and songs on the radio, and it wasn’t just a fad like the “British invasion” or a “New York noise scene.”
Taken from here.
FWIW I really liked Audioslave, so if that’s “selling out” I say people should sell out more.
I had never listened to Louder than Love before, so on @SlapBone recommendation I listened to it this morning at the office and it’s really good, though I think they refined their sound more for Superunknown (which seems is also recorded better). Still, some great tracks there I added to my main play list!
And hey, wtf is wrong with Metallica’s Black album? That things is full of great songs! Songs I’m kind of tired of, granted, but that doesn’t make them any less excellent!
Because there is a straight line from there, to Load, and everything post Load is terrible. …And Justice for All is an amazing album, and probably their best and most musically challenging album. The Black album trades composition and frenetic energy for radio friendly cuts.
It is the epitome of a polished sell out album.
That’s a reasonable argument, but it doesn’t mean Black itself is bad. Sure, what came next isn’t ideal, but Black itself is still great! And it was the last studio record they made that sounded good, too, so you have to give it that.
No, I don’t ascribe the notion of ‘retroactively ruining’ to, well, anything. Not even the Matrix sequels (though that comes close).
But there is a drastic difference in the musical compositions. Listen to the title track …And Justice for All, or One. In particular listen to the drum and bass, and pay attention to the time signatures. Now compare that to The Unforgiven. There is more variance, more complexity to how they are made. Most of the Black Album is straight ahead comparatively. Even Harvester of Sorrow, arguably the most straightforward song on the album, has greater layered depth.
Now different strokes, and all that, so don’t take those as value judgments. But giving a bit of depth to my argument. To me, however, these are things that make …And Justice inherently more enjoyable, and the technically superior album. Black is a very polished version of what it is, but is as much alternative as it is metal, and certainly not the technical thrash metal that Metallica had been. So I don’t hate the Black Album as much as I just don’t have any interest in what it is.
Louder than Love I did listen to, and that is a very different transition for a band. I definitely don’t think that Soundgarden ‘lost’ any element of who they were for Badmotorfinger or Superunknown, as much as they were able to harness what their sound was. Listening there is a definite rawness to the album, that extends to the mixing and playing. As in I can hear that their intentions and abilities are not quite matching. Things don’t come together quite as smoothly as they do later. But the same energy flows from one to the next. I can respect @SlapBone’s preference, as there is a certain edge to the garage band quality that it has. It is not my preference, but I fall towards the technical mastery side of the mastery versus raw garage band spectrum.
Now, while I think of Justice as my favorite metal album of all time, I do find it amusing someone is being told to listen to the bass on the album.
