Soundgarden hits Minneapolis in February, releases their first new album in 16 years

Chris Cornell, Kim Thayil, Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron are bringing their much-missed, exceptional hard rock to the Orpheum Theater on February 2nd of next year. I’m delighted at this choice of venue because it would have been just as easy to fill the Xcel or, worse, the Target Center as the band has a big enough sound. But these guys do it classy!

The band regrouped in 2010 after getting together to address old business; they originally just wanted to create an online presence, as guitarist Thayil explained in this month’s Guitar World. But unveiling a new website and new fan
club wasn’t enough. After putting together a best-of album, Telephantasm, and releasing their first single since 1997, (the previously unreleased “Black Rain”) they were soon back in the studio recording. Their new songs have been popping up in a lot of different places including “Live to Rise” in this past summer’s The Avengers movie.

King Animal (out now!) is their first new record since 1996’s dark and lyrically bleak Down on the Upside (my favorite!) and it certainly lives up to Soundgarden’s signature sound of heavy guitar and soaring vocals. The album’s opener “Been Away Too Long” is a raucous, if slightly predictable tune, and the punchy tempo continues with “Non-State Actor” and “By Crooked Steps,” with Thayil and Shepherd revving their instruments like engines. Cornell sounds pretty good considering he’s been delivering throaty wails for nearly 30 years. In the aforementioned Guitar World article, (definitely worth a read!) Thayil dissects the band’s affinity for altered tuning, specifically drop-D tuning. That heavy, churning sound exists all over King Animal, but doesn’t damper any experimental flair that occasionally surfaces. A great example of this is in the song “Attrition,” written by bassist Ben Shepherd which features an almost Stooges-esque shimmy rhythm. The sludgy Black Sabbath-like “Blood on the Valley Floor” keeps up the menacing lyrical imagery as Cornell sings, “And the blood dries while we spill some more” while on “Rowing” he says, “Can’t fall asleep ‘cause I’ll wake up dead.” I admit some of the lyrics get a little derivative and the music can get a little monotonous and long; on “Rowing” Cornell, in a tinny voice, sings “Don’t know where I’m going/I just keep on rowing/I just keeping on pulling that rope” a few hundred times over minimal guitar and steam-engine percussion before the song finally crescendos and Kim Thayil spews righteous guitar noise all over the place. Sometimes a record just needs to be witnessed on stage to fully come to life. With that, I leave myself in Soundgarden’s capable, weathered hands.