Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Soundgarden
Label: Republic Records
Release: 2012
Length: 52:01
Rating: 5/5
Finally! After sixteen years of hiatus, playing the offended prima donnas and telling the world that after Down On The Upside there was nothing left to add and that splitting up was the only real solution, we get an album that isn’t just there to drain your wallets, because the real glue here is the music, in all its dirty alternative glory. King Animal is a high-octane marvel that has everything that made Soundgarden’s grunge more than just fooling around with three chords – tons of rhythm, wild and venomous riffs, and despite the years everybody involved sounds damn youthful, vital and ready to take on the world’s stages! Even the most impatient listener will figure out after one spin that this record is stitched together the way it should be – with experience, substance and well-thought-out moves that, thank God, have gotten even more refined and distilled over these nearly two decades, and have picked up the one thing that would undoubtedly suit Soundgarden anyway – passion and a damn spicy libido. After Telephantasm and the return from the shadows of oblivion back in 2010, the quartet with its psychedelic metal helmsman got a fresh push, and the product is an outstanding record that I can, without shame or second thoughts, call the album of 2012!
King Animal is the product of four grunge conspirators locking themselves in a studio with the potent producer Adam Kasper, who’s responsible for a small sea of great records – besides the Foo Fighters albums One By One and There Is Nothing Left To Lose, he also has his name on the QOTSA album Songs For The Deaf, he poured clear water for Pearl Jam on Riot Act and Pearl Jam, and thanks to him even Eddie Vedder sounds better on his solo debut Into The Wild. We could add the work with Mudhoney, Cold, R.E.M, Nirvana and a whole sea of others, but even with such outstanding credentials the record could have sounded miserable if it didn’t have its own mass and potential, and, believe it or not, King Animal has all the attributes of a cosmic black hole, while also charging the entire spectrum between the left and right halves of your brain, and the intense infatuation lasts from the first second to the fade of the last chord on a timeline of just over 50 minutes, without you being bored for a single second in between! Provided, of course, that you’re at least half as enthusiastic about the toxic dirt and bareness of the nineties, which I’d personally kill for!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0A71tITqe0
The opener Been Away Too Long is a gorgeous intro to what awaits you. Chris and Kim play with rhythm in that recognizable, massively distorted way, backed by thick chords, and after the time off in Pearl Jam, a lot of work also fell to the superb Matt Cameron and to one of the most potent bassists of the grunge era, the still-vital Ben Shepherd. As Chris sings – you could walk a thousand miles and get nowhere, but the bottom line is that Soundgarden have returned to the spot where they stepped off their train of thoughts and emotions, and, improved, built a bridge between the previous millennium and this one without turning into burnt-out, creaky old relics! The dice have been rolled again, and Soundgarden are breaking new ground with a verve they didn’t even have anymore in the last years of their previous musical life. Proof that none of this is an accident is the song Non-State Actor, which could easily fit into the overall frame of the outstanding BadMotorFinger, while the multi-award-winning Superunknown is just the yardstick Soundgarden use to measure the height of the flow of thoughts and ideas they beam over the airwaves into your subconscious on every album, dear listeners. Maybe the solo detour was necessary for Mr. Cornell to empty his pouch of all the hollow seeds, and Audioslave gave a new take on making more dynamic and less mopey music, the kind Soundgarden knew how to make so well. King Animal is a record Soundgarden make under a full head of mental steroids, caffeine and adrenaline, familiar to every musician who wants to prove themselves to the world and who knows they’re not ready for premature write-offs and retirement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIDInlJJFb0
By Crooked Steps is more of a psychedelic trip, and with the meter of Rusty Cage the foursome declare that their newfound faith in the power and pulse of improved hearts is for their own enjoyment and for strengthening everything positive, while the old junk, thank the gods, has been left behind. A Thousand Days Before is the calmer moment of the record, and in the manner of Down On The Upside, both soft acoustics and muffled distortion drip into the bowl of emotions, and not just any schmuck could measure up to Kim Thayil and Chris Cornell. Next up, Blood On The Valley Floor sets the metronome hands back to lower revs, and Soundgarden, with the signature might of a hundred-ton icebreaker, crack the patches of ice around the heart membranes of the last ossified fossils who stopped hoping after 1996 for the right measure of depression, world-weariness and punch in the same bag. Bones Of Birds weaves into the whole with the precision of a crystal-clear scalpel, and in its tuning it resembles a mix of Blow Up The Outside World, Burden In My Hand and Black Hole Sun. What I’ve always found sexy about Soundgarden is that they can only be compared to themselves, with the sweet melodic vocal hooks of a venomously good Cornell, who pairs so nicely with both the bassist and the superb drummer in thirds and fourths. The continuation is even stoner-sleepy, and with its bluesy alt-rock tinkering with your nerve endings, Taree slides into the kaleidoscope of your mind images of a once-mighty roster of names that wove outstanding music and died of heroin overdoses, and Cornell, in his own way, pays homage to the late singer of Alice In Chains and Mad Season, so besides the silhouette of Layne Staley, a few others might turn up in the city of ghosts … Attrition sounds like it was written by the Stone Age queens Queens Of The Stone Age, and the juicy goodness of a short interlude conjures up such a solid erection that many have only dreamed about in the last few years. Not even the acoustic bareness of the very catchy little song Black Saturday spoils this perfection, and with the obvious new hit, the song Halfway There, it creeps into a more robust whole so elementally and so suggestively mighty that any hope of resisting or denying that the record touched you goes out the window. Even the far more chaotic and very Soundgarden-esque projectile of well-articulated chaos and depression, Worse Dreams, doesn’t ruin the integrity of the picture or the brilliance of an experience that this album about the king of animals serves up in gardens of perfect sound with no flab, no hollow bits and no bad, rotten, soft tissue of excess fat, while the remaining two songs, Eyelid’s Mouth and Rowing, crown the sixth full-length from the Seattle gods of noise and modern psychedelia in a manner for which we’ll light a candle every evening from now on and say a sincere prayer that Soundgarden don’t change their minds and end up on opposite shores of their creative garage again …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkecIBT7hME
King Animal deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as the sound of rainy Seattle, and Soundgarden, along with a few remaining forefathers of that mighty, epic nineties sound, have stayed true to their roots, their sound and their work ethic. The timing of the comeback is just right, because there’s never too much good music, and with the scene being undernourished across the board, the easiest bet is on proven racehorses that, years notwithstanding, and I’ll say it again, are anything but worn-out nags headed for the butcher’s stamp and deportation to Horse Burger’s fast-food restaurant. The sixth studio full-length from the American demigods of grunge is as juicy and alive as ever, perfect for many a trip to the land of Nirvana, and the pantheon of sacred names from the past deserves a refresh, an airing-out, and the fact, underlined in golden letters, that not every comeback act is driven onto stages and into studios purely for financial reasons. Besides a financial interest, Soundgarden also have one hell of a sense for nurturing the soul and reviving the long-forgotten ideal definitions of what good music should always be!
Lineup
Matt Cameron – drums, backing vocals
Chris Cornell – vocals, rhythm guitar
Kim Thayil – lead guitar
Ben Shepherd – bass, backing vocals
Production
Adam Kasper
Tracklist
- Been Away Too Long
- Non-State Actor
- By Crooked Steps
- A Thousand Days Before
- Blood On The Valley Floor
- Bones Of Birds
- Taree
- Attrition
- Black Saturday
- Halfway There
- Worse Dreams
- Eyelid’s Mouth
- Rowing
