Like Suicide: 30 Years of Soundgarden’s Superunknown

The year 1994 was for alternative rock what 1984 was for pop music — that is if Madonna suddenly died after making Like a Virgin, anyway.

Kurt Cobain gave us his all in his final, and most graceful performance on MTV Unplugged. His undervalued widow Courtney Love mourned and raged on her own band Hole’s torrential masterpiece Live Through This. Pearl Jam, then perhaps the biggest band in the world, put forth their rawest and most uncompromising album, Vitalogy, before martyring themselves on the altar of trying to take down Ticketmaster, their rawest and most uncompromising political act. Green Day’s Dookie finally invented the Stateside punk superstar decades after The Ramones and The Clash only sporadically clawed at the American charts. Just as the Berkeley pop-punk trio immediately ascended to previously unknown heights in their world, Nine Inch Nails and Weezer instantaneously became the biggest industrial and power-pop outfits of all-time respectively, with their fiercely cherished 1994 efforts.

And this wave spread. R.E.M.’s Monster and Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Sleeps With Angels remain underrated late-career highs for world-beating veterans who were revitalized by this distorted guitar revival and pulled into its gravity. Beck (Mellow Gold), Beastie Boys (Ill Communication), Soul Coughing (Ruby Vroom), and even a Los Lobos side venture (Latin Playboys) were combining live instrumentation and sampled old records rescued from deep-basement obscurity in ways that rivaled hip-hop and electronic DJs for the most innovative music on the planet, and some of them even scored unlikely massive hits (“Loser,” “Sabotage”).

I haven’t even touched on the bit players like Sonic Youth (Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star), L7 (Hungry for Stink), Pavement (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain), Sebadoh (Bakesale) and my beloved Archers of Loaf (Archers of Loaf vs. The Greatest of All Time) who were all offering up severely crunchy, wiry, loose-strung, wry, bleary-eyed new innovations with their variously budgeted guitar rigs to narrower audiences without overlooking great songs. Even so-called knockoffs like Veruca Salt, Toadies and Stone Temple Pilots were minting absolute rock radio classics, and some of the albums they appeared on were underrated, too. Make no mistake, 1994 was the greatest year alternative music’s ever had.

And then you had Soundgarden. Grunge-tagged hard-rockers who’d been crushing riffs in their Seattle-borne fists since the beginning, they kept accruing commercial stature as they grew artistically and virtuosically — by 1994 only Cobain himself could rival Chris Cornell’s fearsome wail as a pure vocalist in loud rock, and they came from very different worlds. Of course Nirvana was influenced by Led Zeppelin, who wasn’t? You can enjoy an teenage Kurt endearingly slopping his earliest band’s way through “Heartbreaker” on 2004’s vault-emptying box With the Lights Out. But he really found his footing in punk and discordance, making tuneful sense of his favorite sludge like Melvins and Flipper. This made him an outlier from the metal-derived Alice in Chains, the ‘70s classic rock at the heart of Pearl Jam, and the heavier, proggier fare championed by Soundgarden. Cornell in particular was quickly realizing he had the chest and larynx to pull off Robert Plant’s divebombing shrieks, operating trills and quavering vibratos; they’re the only keepers of the “Seattle sound” who gave off a whiff of Rush or Judas Priest.

As such, Soundgarden’s 1994 magnum opus Superunknown, which turns 30 this week, stands as the most technically accomplished work of the alt-rock revolution. While certainly not slick, the quartet’s chops were showcasing incredible new things with guitar (“Rusty Cage”) and voice (“Jesus Christ Pose”) alone on 1991’s Grammy-nominated breakthrough Badmotorfinger. Their ability to harness new sounds out of formally recognized proficiency rivaled Sonic Youth’s on the other end of the spectrum breaking all cosmic laws regarding tone and tuning to mine the crevices of musical common sense.

 

VIDEO: Soundgarden “Black Hole Sun”

Kim Thayil’s guitar sounded like an alien serpent coiling through different formations on “Rusty Cage” thanks to the de facto filter of his wah pedal in the resting position. And Cornell’s banshee howl on “Jesus Christ Pose” found new ways to ascend on the ferris-wheel-paced thud of “Limo Wreck,” with its positively Satanic chorus, or the fire-and-brimstone screech on “The Day I Tried to Live” that rubbed against Thayil’s palm-muted modulations. Plant’s blues bent can be felt more clearly in “Let Me Down,” while the astronomical “Black Hole Sun” and more sullen “Fell on Black Days” showed that Cornell could hold back and simply croon in his lower register on amazing songs, too.

For their parts, bassist Ben Shepard and drummer Matt Cameron reeled everything in, not making the impossible sound easy per se but making the mathematically incongruent sound natural. Even Superunknown songs released to radio feature time signatures in 6/4, 7/8, and 5/4, and “Limo Wreck” makes 15/8 click into place like a Swiss watch. Cornell and Thayil are the attention-getters, allowing Shepard and Cameron to crunch the numbers behind these monolithic and lopsided constructions without any exposed wiring.

 

VIDEO: Soundgarden “My Wave”

The first ten songs are absolutely flawless, especially remarkable when they turn to psychedelic dimensions on the almost videogame-like coda of “My Wave” or the Beatles-drugged “Head Down,” though the crawling growl of “Mailman” or frantic feast of “Superunknown” are no less astounding. Then they stretch their legs a bit, like Yo La Tengo about to grind on an organ drone for ten-plus minutes in the third act. “Half” and “Kickstand” take up less than four minutes between them, for punk/goof palate cleansers, and “4th of July” and “Like Suicide” are surprisingly muted epics for such a grandiose statement. My favorite tune after those opening ten, though, is the Japan-only bonus track “She Likes Surprises,” the band’s most paisley-fringed tune ever, yet inside of 3:16 it also incorporates as many twisty chord changes and strange landings as anything on the album proper.

If Superunknown proved anything that their contemporaries didn’t, it’s that virtuosity need not be exclusive to the countercultural. Soundgarden may have been the least political (even Alice in Chains were inspired to write “Man in the Box” after learning about veal) of the big four Seattle bands, and the most likely to spin out i0nto freewheeling psych, but they proved their mettle with unpredictable sounds and vivid sonic hues like any pedal-damaging flannel-wearer. Even if Cornell was built to belt Puccini. He’s missed.