Album Autopsy: The Presidents of the United States of America's Self-Titled

Disclaimer: The following piece is a super-in-depth look at one of my favorite records, and as such, it is riddled with personal opinions and praise for said record. This cannot be helped.

I make arbitrary and impulsive decisions very regularly, decisions that brighten my day by having no other purpose. Whether it’s an afternoon iced coffee, a $0.99 in-app purchase, or an evening drive without a destination, I try to allow spontaneity into my life to break up the general monotony of work and responsibility. The effects of these snap calls rarely last beyond a few seconds of elation; however, there is in my memory one completely random decision of mine that has had a truly lasting effect on my daily life, one from which I still regularly reap the rewards.

During my first semester of college, I found myself with $15 and zero intention to save it. While pondering a use for this money, the video for “Peaches” by The Presidents of the United States of America cycled onto my TV, a tune with which I was familiar but that I had not given very much attention. Impressed by the band’s twangy rock and goofball attitude, I promptly jumped into my car, drove down to my local FYE, and with that $15 picked up their eponymous debut record, an album that has since become one of my all-time favorites.

Every time I pop The Presidents of the United States of America into my CD player, I am baffled and amazed by how natural the music mixes energy and beauty. PUSA combines the thrashing and speedy tempos of punk rock with riffs reminiscent of the golden age of rock’n’roll, weaving a wave of sound that is seriously infectious. “We Are Not Going to Make It” and “Lump” fire off with the tempo and dynamics of a bottlerocket, while “Stranger” and “Candy” opt for pretty strings and funky beats. PUSA lays technical skill over thoughtful aesthetics, creating a sonic stream that takes not a single wrong turn. 

Between fluid dynamics, explosive energy, and the occasional time signature swap, The Presidents’ composition shows serious skill. However, their greatest weapon lies not in the shape of their songs, but the instruments they use to create them. Rather than playing a conventional bass, Chris Ballew employs a custom 2-stringed basitar, while Dave Dederer rocks a 3-stringed guitbass. These two hodgepodge creations are woven together in intricate chords and melodies, letting PUSA delve into sonic territory that is wholly their own. And as if that wasn’t enough, drummer Jason Finn even plays an unorthodox kit, prominently featuring a cowbell and a block while absolutely devoid of ride or crash cymbals. PUSA uses ingenuity and audacity in their instrument choice, further separating their hectic and oddball sound from any other act.

Just like the instrumentation, the lyrical content of this record is skill laced with insanity. Chris’ lyrics are almost entirely nonsensical in nature, and all but four songs feature references to animals. Few compositions step into the real world, and if they do, they are loaded with self-deprecating humor that tears down whatever human image Chris may have. Yet beneath the silly and whimsical language, Chris builds layers of sincerity, of emotion and intelligence, using word craft and plenty of literary devices to mirror the thematic images that his songs construct. There is plenty of crazy to be found on this record, but so to is there honesty and intellect.

Between the instrumentation and the lyrical madness, each song on The Presidents of the United States of America is much like an oddity at a carnival—enticing, mythical, a spectacle. So please forgive me as I pull back the curtain these peculiar yet wonderful tunes to give every one its due.

1.    Kitty

It takes a certain audacity to open up your debut record with your most bizarre song, but the Presidents are nothing if not ballsy. While the chorus is infectiously catchy, the verses of “Kitty” move in a sleek groove punctuated by incessant “meows.” Chris’ character first invites a poor cat into his house, only to quickly suffer a scratch attack before finally dismissing it with the lines: “fuck you kitty / you’re gonna spend the night outside.” The speaker’s excitement seems to double for the cut-time coda, as he belts the excited “Kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty kitty touch it” like a seven-year-old with ADHD. PUSA kicks off their eponymous debut with a song that both rocks and perplexes, giving the listener a straight-away shot of their humor without any qualms.

2.    Feather Pluckn

As if the opener wasn’t silly enough, The Presidents hardly pause before sliding into their next tune, “Feather Pluckn.” Chris and Dave play as a unit here, bending their strings in a goofy progression that bounces through the verses before diving into full distorted rock for the choruses. Jason Finn’s drumming drives the song, dominating syncopated hits and using his hihat to control the dynamics. 

But perhaps the most effective part of the song is Chris’ vocal melody, which somehow manages to give life and vivacity to his nonsensical lyrics. The focus appears to be animals sharing secrets, painting scenes of “birdies…talking in codes to clams in the clouds.” Chris’ gentle, bopping verse melody sounds like he is trying to stay out of earshot, yet his chorus vocals explode as he exclaims “ten million monkeys all pick up guitars / nobody taught them how,” the secret finally bursting from his lips. Using emphatic vocals to tell this silly tale with enthusiasm and grace, Chris lets the humor and insanity of “Feather Pluckn” shine against the tight instrumentation.

3.    Lump

The first punk banger of the record, “Lump” is the result of Chris Ballew’s “trying to write a Buzzcocks song” with his band’s unique instrumentation. While initially inspired by a benign tumor in his head, Ballew tossed everything of the “too depressing” idea except the title, instead using his language to relate the tale of a woman lying in the mud. He plays with sound in his lyrics, weilding alliterative phrases like “Lump lingered last in line for brains” or “life limped along at subsonic speeds.” His spirited delivery and simple but catchy language choices expertly complement the driving drums and screaming strings, creating a perfect mix of punk and pop that, when released as a single, helped launch them into the public’s eye.

4.    Stranger

Though the lyrics are full of clumsy pick-up lines like “you seem pretty cool for a naked chick in a booth,” for this record, “Stranger” is perhaps the song most grounded in reality. Jason pulls his drums far into the background on this one, letting Dave and Chris pine away on their strings as Chris’ vocal awkwardly asks out an exotic dancer. “Stranger” provides us an excellent glimpse of how these PUSA ties the guitbass and basitar together, each melody complementing the other both theoretically and emotionally. The verses would seem almost innocently romantic if they weren’t spoiled by the creepy chorus and the absurd mumbling of the outro. With “Stranger,” Chris reveals to us a touch of his amorous side before drenching it in his humor like a throwing a glass of wine in our faces.

5.    Boll Weevil

The first tale of the record to directly personify an animal, “Boll Weevil” wobbles into a world rife with ridiculousness. Chris spins the yarn of a fat bug that refuses to leave his house, simply content to melt in front of the TV while getting high. The groove is as funky as the melody, the band mixing classic rock’n’roll rhythms against their punk thrashing. Though the vocal harmonies really shine, it is Jason Finn’s diverse drumming that really moves the tune along: his verse beat is syncopated and slippery, while his chorus pattern cuts the 4/4 into 12/8 and turns the intensity up to eleven. “Boll Weevil” shows PUSA pull the funk forward in their sound, giving Finn a space to flaunt his beat building skills.

6.    Peaches

The hit song that gave the Presidents’ their platform, “Peaches” is an excellent example of this band’s ability to harness pop sensibility. The tune is split into two distinct suites, one soft and one heavy, taking the listener on a leisurely walk that quickly ramps up into a full-on adventure. Chris’ melody begins sweet and succulent, strolling over wavering strings and soft hihat work from Finn. The chorus pick up the pace a bit, before the song slides into the chugging coda, pushing a dissonant chord progression and crashing percussion.

The dichotomized composition also reflects the hidden themes built into the lyrics. According to Chris, “Peaches” is about his time beneath a peach tree as he worked up the courage to ask out a crush. The first half of the song reflects optimism and positivity with lines like “moving to the country / gonna eat a lot of peaches,” not to mention more than a bit innuendo with “poke my finger down inside.” Yet Chris never did speak to that girl, as reflected in the second half, where he acknowledges that out there are “millions of peaches / peaches for me,” rather than just the one he had been craving. While “Peaches” initially seems cute if not vapid, closer inspection reveals deep layers of meaning in every choice the Presidents’ make.

7.    Dune Buggy

Kicking off with the most dissonant riff on the record, “Dune Buggy” juxtaposes dark, rumbling strings with the sunny tale of a spider taking a little joyride in his tiny dune buggy. Dave and Chris slap a cool groove beneath the vocals, as Chris describes this diminutive vehicle that rocks a “squishy transmission” and a “sassy chassis.” The very idea of a small bug tearing across the sand, hitting jumps and showing off for his spider woman, is both imaginative and adorable, but the Presidents’ choice to partner it with brooding instrumentation helps the imagery to stand out even further. While initially my least favorite tune on the record, “Dune Buggy” has since won me over, and with every listen leaves me wishing there was an extra seat for me in that “little blue dune buggy.”

8.    We Are Not Going to Make It

Another punk rock essential, “We Are Not Going to Make It” takes The Presidents’ preposterous sense of humor and turns it in on themselves. Above a pounding and simple progression, the Presidents’ openly admit to sucking, stating “there’s a million better bands with a million better songs.” Jason Finn lets his drums sound clumsily against the strings’ power chords, mirroring the self-deprecating tone of the line “we don’t have the talent.” The song even features a false, faltering start that is perfectly in tune with their out-of-tune concept. “We Are Not Going to Make It” batters the band and the listener alike, flauting faux ineptitude and humor without a hint of remorse.

9.    Kick Out the Jams

A half-bastardized cover of the proto-punk anthem by MC5, “Kick Out the Jams” is PUSA at their most punk. Finn’s drums are driving, Dave’s guitbass screams through a fuzz pedal, and Chris howls against the tide of his pummeling bass notes. His rewritten lyrics are utter nonsense, his language referencing the band’s name with phrases like “This is my term” and a barking promise of “I solemnly swear to uphold the Constitution,” yet not an iota of the original version’s infectious energy is lost or misplaced. The whole affair clocks in at less than 90 seconds, giving the listener a quick distilled injection of The Presidents of the United States of America before exploding into silence almost as quickly as it appeared.

10.  Body

If “Dune Buggy” puts darkness and light in the same room, “Body” forces them to sit face-to-face and have a conversation. Dave and Chris tie their strings together in a creeping, almost disturbing riff, mirroring a vocal melody that feels so unhinged, it might as well be seeping from the mouth of a sociopath. The choruses burst forth from quiet verses, Jason Finn jostling his hihat and rolling along his entire kit, while the coda blooms outward like a furious mushroom cloud.

The instrumentation may be unequivocally dark, but Chris’ lyrics hold far more ambiguity, as he somehow simultaneously evokes themes of pet love, sexual desire, and death. The verses call out to “little” animal friends, following their cute little lives to unfortunate ends: “Little salamander, where did you go? / Edge of the yard / I found you, you know / All brown and hard.” But the prechorus refrain of “I can’t get your body / out of my mind” dumps the platonic feelings for something more obsessive and sinister, leading to the strange erotic chorus line “She goes smooth through my body.” Chris melds together three completely antithetical ideas in “Body” with a level of craftsmanship unattainable by most other acts, adding a truly dark edge to PUSA’s normally humorous music.

11.  Back Porch

My favorite tune on the record, “Back Porch” is a ditty spun in the key of a backwoods bumpkin. Chris alternates to fifths in his bassline, while Finn is glued to his snare, the twangy country verses punctuated by full-on punk choruses. Between images of a goofy animal band serenade, Chris places multiple references to other songs on the record, his character “slurping on a peach” with a “kitty at my foot.” He even calls out to Finn, the “chicken on the drums,” who responds with a tiny yet heartfelt fill. Topped off by perhaps the best mid-song rant ever written, “Back Porch” is the Presidents’ flexing their absurdity, drenching the instrumentation and the lyrics with completely nonsensical and hilarious fun.

12.  Candy

Continuing the carnal tone launched in “Peaches,” “Candy” this time applies the sexual directly to the edible. Chris invokes the orgasmic quality of his sweets by personifying them as a woman, describing her “red rope hair, gumdrop lips / cotton candy thighs,” attributes that leave him and his teeth “worn and useless.” Accompanying this overtly erotic imagery is instrumentation that is wholly hypnotic, the strings linked in perfect unison over Finn’s metronomic drums. The band slips from 6/8 in the song proper to a subdued 4/4 bridge, letting Dave rip a quiet but evocative solo on his guitbass that gives me chills. “Candy” is the sleeper hit of The Presidents of the United States, prioritizing feel and sound over humor and showing just how hard this band can hit, even when they lean back into gentler territory.

13.  Naked and Famous

Brandishing another expertly knotted string section riff, The Presidents’ tie a bow on their debut record with “Naked and Famous.” Dave and Chris work as one player in this, practically finishing each other’s musical sentences. The song starts by wandering through lyrical images that appear to have no meaning whatsoever (“3D billboards and big / thirty-foot smurfs”), but the song truly comes together in the second half: the tempo is fired up, the gain pushed to 100, and guest musician Kim Thayil of Soundgarden tears the tune apart with a face-melting solo. “Naked and Famous” firmly shuts the book the Presidents’ eponymous first release, crashing to an end with all the grace of a train on a blown-out bridge.

Despite eschewing really any conventional sound palette, it’s pretty obvious that The Presidents of the United States of America have mastered the technical aspects of their craft. However, their music also communicates to me (and based on the record’s commercial performance, many others too) on a much more personal level, largely due to the band’s refusal to take any of it seriously. As Chris puts it, The Presidents are “entertainers, not artists;” the response of the crowd, laughter and joy, are the currencies they deal in.

For the band, “entertainment is job one,” and the fact that they can manage to bring so much absurd happiness to their fans with such a well-polished machine is truly admirable. Best of all, this silliness is not manufactured or a shtick; it’s who these guys are. Chris had apparently been making silly music long before he started The Presidents, and the fact that he now makes music for young children only proves his commitment to his crazy craft. The humor is inherent to their sound, and just as pivotal as the guitbass or the snare drum. There can be no PUSA without it.

What The Presidents of the United States of America offers to the world is wholly unique and wholly the Presidents. Their music is catchy, rockin’, visceral, and often hysterically funny. I picked it up on a completely unprecedented impulse decision, and still find every spin to be refreshing, exciting, and fun. I may never understand what prompted me to scoop up this seminal and inspiring album, but I will always know it to be $15 very well spent.

Song Spotlight: Soundgarden's "Like Suicide"

            In digging through my albums to find a subject for an article, many of the CDs I end up writing about are ones with which I have history. Some I’ve played almost to the point of breaking them, while others I’ve owned for years and have hardly listened past the radio singles. For records such as these, previous opinions of a younger and less-eclectic me are stuffed inside the jewel cases, and when I break out those discs to give them a true listen, I find that the new opinions and the old rarely match up. Often the songs I once adored, radio hits and catchy choruses, take a backseat to the deep cuts, where the artists weren’t afraid to experiment or embed some easter egg for the listener. And more often, the songs that I hated and misunderstood become songs I cannot stop playing, which was absolutely the case when I began spinning Soundgarden’s Superunknown.

              When I first listened to that record around the age of fourteen, there were a bunch of songs I just didn’t “get,” but none more so than the closer “Like Suicide.” Although the chorus was cool and catchy, my overall impression of the tune was a resounding meh. It was slow, Chris’ singing was drawn out and moany and lacked for the screaming power that he employed through the rest of the record, and worst of all, it was long. I didn’t understand it, and what I could understand I didn’t much care for, so I didn’t listen to it. I went years without ever tasting Superunknown in its entirety, because I knew that the final course was a drawn-out jam that took forever to get going.

            This impression of “Like Suicide” sat somewhere in my head for almost a decade, until I decided to return to the record with an open mind, and this time around, I felt as if I was hearing a completely different song. Immediately, Matt Cameron establishes a groove with his drum beat, releasing the snare and creating a more primal sound. As the guitars enter, alternating between a swelling riff and spacious chords, the song’s eerie and somber tone materializes, a perfect introduction for Chris’ soulful vocal. The song takes its time to slowly build in energy and intensity: Chris’ vocals increasingly push the volume and range upward, until Cameron flips his snare back on and smacks his drum, igniting the tune into a new level of heaviness. All of this leads up to a ripping solo from Kim Thayil, who completely melts the face of his fretboard with speedy runs and precise melodies. This lead pulls the groove all the way to the end, where the band sinks into a quiet and weighty final chorus.

              Perhaps it was my youthful naiveté that kept me from appreciating this song the first time around, but now I find “Like Suicide” to be completely fascinating. The song’s composition alone is extraordinary; with “Like Suicide,” Soundgarden avoids standard structure, delivering all the verses before building to the chorus, rather than alternating between the parts. The focus on dynamics, building the tune to the point of explosion, is brilliant and poignant, a musical background to the final breath about which the lyrics revolve. Also, the guitars’ Open-D tuning allows for a deliciously spacious timbre, creating room for Chris’ vocals to flutter about as they dive and rise. 

            Every choice this band makes for the song is well-placed and deftly executed, creating the perfect musical movement for Chris’ lyrics, which describe an incident that occurred as he was composing. According to an interview with Melody Maker, after hearing a loud thumping noise outside his house, Chris found “a beautiful female robin writhing on the ground. She’d broken her neck flying into the window.” It fell to Chris to end the creature’s suffering with a brick, immediately after which he was inspired to write “Like Suicide.”[1] Through the incident, Chris became intertwined with this bird’s final moments, and his connection with the suicidal robin bleeds into his poetry. In the first verse, he relates the discovery of his “broken gift” lying “dazed out in a garden bed / With a broken neck.” But as he ends her suffering, he becomes entangled in the experience of her death, finding a “taste so sour” in his mouth as he “wield[s] a ton of rage.” Finally, he memorializes this strange moment and strange bird that “lived like a murder” until the moment the brick fell.[2] Chris’ lyrics are morbid but poignant, and his vocal is as respectful as it is earnest. This combines with the dynamic approach of the music to create a sort of eulogy, a celebration of an uncommon death.

              Regardless of the intelligent and meticulous musical choices, the powerful inspiration stemming from the incident, the entire tune feels riddled with truth and reality. Listening to it now, I see easily how such a song could have completely eluded my young teenaged mind. Now, I find in its seven minutes so much honest connection with the concept of death, as well as the complete bewilderment it brings every time it seeps into our lives, for, as Soundgarden makes apparent, there is nothing the living understand less than death.

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[1] http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/mm_3-19-94.shtml

[2] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/soundgarden/likesuicide.html

Soundgarden - Superunknown

Though I’ve spent much of my time diving into mostly independent acts, my CD collection is hardly lacking for seminal records. In fact, much of my current exploration was kicked off by listening to those records that had been deemed imperative by rock enthusiasts. As I entered high school, my interest in Seattle’s grunge scene had begun to blossom, and when I received Soundgarden’s Superunknown for Christmas one year, I was overjoyed. For the next five years, I spun this record so often that my dizziness forced me to shelve it for a while, but in returning to it now, I find that I have an even deeper appreciation for the fifteen songs that define Superunknown.

Anyone who spins Superunknown will quickly realize just why this record is revered. The array of sounds that these four musicians compile throughout the album is extremely diverse, a fact hardly undue to the four talented musicians who put it together. Kim Thayil’s guitar seems to touch upon every possible genre and mode available to him as he grinds through heavy chords in “4^th of July,” whirls along strange scales in “Head Down,” and shreds across the fretboard in “Like Suicide.” Chris Cornell’s vocals similarly climb and dive along energy, volume, and tone, screaming in songs like “Let Me Drown” while walking along above a whisper in “Fell on Black Days.” Behind this chaos is more chaos, as Ben Shepard beats strange and complicated lines out of his bass, and Matt Cameron smashes his set with steady hits and teases his cymbals into madness with gentle taps. This duo locks itself into a tight unit of rhythm while playing with high caliber attitudes, taking tunes like “My Wave” and “Spoonman” and turning them into rhythm-driven monsters.

The four members of Soundgarden are ostensibly a tight-knit unit with almost-familial chemistry, and this complete musical synthesis allows them to create extremely complex and intrinsically intelligent compositions. For Superunknown, all four members are principal writers, and the resulting conflicts and synchronicities in style and thought allow for insanely interesting songs to form. In an interview with Guitar World, producer Michael Beinhorn commented that this record is “four guys with completely different points of view about how they compose and what they like,” the results of which, while remaining undoubtedly Soundgarden, “represents more of what they're about as individuals.”[1]

This convergence of individual thinkers is one of the reasons why Superunknown is laden with technical choices, including a pile of odd time signatures: “Fell on Black Days” and “Fresh Tendrils” are in 6/4, both “Spoonman” and “The Day I Tried to Live” groove between 4/4 and 7/4, and “Limo Wreck” stomps through a maddening 15/8. Interlocking with these syncopal structures are the many alternate tunings employed by the guitarists, including Drop-D (“Spoonman,” “Let Me Drown,” “Black Hole Sun”), Drop-C (“Mailman,” Limo Wreck”), Open-C (“Half,” “Head Down,”), Open-D “(Like Suicide), and even the ridiculously overlapping EEBBBB (“My Wave,” “The Day I Tried to Live”).[2] And although Kim Thayil asserts that such insanities are naught but “a total accident,”[3] he may be suffering from a bout of humility; there is a clear method containing all this madness, for every note on Superunknown feels precisely natural. Soundgarden’s four members may have been writing for themselves on this record, but the ultimate product is something as cohesive as it is manifold.

Although the shape and structure of the songs on this album are as varied as snowflakes, these musicians connect best as a unit, and the consensus apparently was to write a record that is both dark and heavy. The guitars chug and the drums pound, while Cornell’s deviant and oppressed poetics mix with his soulful vocals to imbue dismal emotion with a terrifyingly gritty and brutally genuine authenticity. For me, one of the darkest tunes on the record is the trudging “Mailman,” whose pulverizing, distorted guitar progression sounds like a B-side from Black Sabbath’s Paranoid sessions. This slow progression is built over two initial measures of 4/4 followed by a measure in 7/8 and a measure in 6/8, a movement that reflects the slow but sure diminishing voice that plagues Chris Cornell’s lyrics. While the band slogs along beneath him with heavy chords, booming hits, and rumbling bass, Cornell intones in the voice of the formerly oppressed that have risen above their oppressors. Once the “dirt beneath your feet,” Cornell has finally found both recognition and power, and the crushed now gets to do the crushing. With an almost sickly moan, he wails “this time I’m sure you’ll know that I am here,” before riding the object of his loathing “all the way” to the bottom.[4] Chris’ character seems willing to destroy himself if only to even the score, his revenge fueled by pure hatred and unfettered by any sense of self preservation. Between the rattling main riff and Cornell’s vocal, “Mailman” is defined by absolute hopelessness, a song stained black with utter despair.

Similar to the pervading darkness, Superunkown is defined by its unrelenting heavy tone, upon which apparently most of the time recording was spent perfecting.[5] There is a significant weight present in the guitar sound, which permeates each tune regardless of energy or subject matter, and for no song on Superunknown is this truer than “Head Down.” Penned and arranged by bassist Ben Shepard, “Head Down” features an acoustic rhythm guitar layered with a distorted and reverb-laden electric guitar, the combination of which is surprisingly deep and resonant. In an interview with Melody Maker, Cornell described the song as “a big, wide, open song” that “sounds like a place,”[6] and certainly the soaring and interlocking guitar parts in the main riff, not to mention Cameron’s improv-heavy drumming, paint their own musical landscape; however, when the guitars begin strumming chords under Chris’ falsetto, this scene suddenly becomes more nightmarish, as the blending acoustic and electric create a sound that is nothing but sinister. The sweeping space of the song suddenly shrinks into a stifling cell as Chris demands, “Bow down to live your life.”[7] Furthermore, the seemingly random percussion layered in the background is reminiscent of either hard labor or gunshots, thus morphing this cramped space into an oppressive one, such as a prison or POW camp. Though a relatively simple and quiet tune from this record, “Head Down” carries both a sonic and emotional heaviness on its back that contradicts its gentle demeanor.

Burgeoning from the lyrical content of Superunknown is a whole slew of dark themes and ideas that further knits the record together. Cornell contributed the bulk of the poetry on the album, and it is easily evident that he is in touch with his inner disturbances. Death and destruction are heavy influences on Chris’ hand, as he describes an LSD-induced apocalypse in “4^th of July” and the karmic payout of decadence in “Limo Wreck.”[8] In a similar vein, both “Fell on Black Days” and “The Day I Tried to Live” revolve around the idea of being unable to conquer the troubles of living—in these songs, living is figurative suffering, an idea which is explored more literally in “Head Down” and “Mailman.”

One could easily argue these depressing themes have been far overworked in music, but Cornell’s linguistic choices in presenting them gives fresh breath to this beaten corpse. Although his imagery is relatively sparse, Cornell nails the listener with vivid images that become lodged in the head. Rather than focus on visuals, however, Soundgarden’s frontman employs heavy use of contrast, contradiction, and paradox, giving us phrases that ignite our brains into intellectual frenzies. In “Superunknown,” he uses his verses to destroy the automatic associations we create with words, such as “If this doesn’t make you free / It doesn’t mean you’re tied / If this doesn’t take you down / It doesn’t mean you’re high.”[9] A similar contrast is employed in “Fell on Black Days,” as he moans “Whomsoever I’ve cured I’ve sickened now / And whomsoever I cradled, I’ve put you down.”[10] Cornell even applies this idea of contradiction to an entire song in “Spoonman.” Written for the Seattle street performer Artis the Spoonman, Cornell states that “Spoonman” is about “the paradox of who [Artis] is and what people perceive him as.”[11] In such ways, the lyrics present on Superunknown effectively tap into the darkest parts of our psyche by breaking down both the language and the thought processes that give shape to the world around us, using our own minds to better capture and proliferate the themes of the record.

In crawling back to Superunknown after years of hiatus, I must say that I am even more impressed with how cognitive and tremendous this record is. I do, however, have one bone to pick with Soundgarden, or more specifically, Matt Cameron. Although an undeniably talented drummer (Pearl Jam picked him up, after all,[12] and he was also featured on Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore[13]), Cameron’s beats are very simple and full of open space. And while I can truthfully say I’ve never heard a drummer so effectively employ negative space, I feel that his lack of improvisation, attack or even fills pins the album’s energy to the ground, keeping songs that would otherwise explode in a fiery mass from even popping. There is so much dead air in his percussion that if that’s what you’re focusing on, you can very quickly lose interest in the music.

Despite this single misgiving, Soundgarden’s Superunknown has undeniably earned its place in the list of seminal rock records. With abrasive guitars, heady composition, and thoughtful lyrics, Superunknown’s fifteen tracks inspire the body to move and the mind to whirl. There is no shortage of interesting moments or innovative concepts on this record, yet the soul of the band is what is forefront, because, as Kim Thayil put it, “We’re not throwing our brain at people….we’re sharing our heart.”[14] With Superunknown, Soundgarden delivers both the cerebral and the meaningful via tunes that are extremely catchy, a prodigious combination that makes each listen as dangerous as it is brilliantly fun.

Tunes to Check Out:
1) Mailman
2) Fresh Tendrils
3) Like Suicide

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[1] http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/gplayer_6-94.shtml

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superunknown#Composition

[3] http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/gplayer_6-94.shtml

[4] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/soundgarden/mailman.html

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superunknown#Recording

[6] http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/mm_11-27-93.shtml

[7] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/soundgarden/headdown.html

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superunknown#Composition

[9] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/soundgarden/superunknown.html

[10] http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/soundgarden/fellonblackdays.html

[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superunknown#Composition

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_jam#Band_members

[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adore_%28The_Smashing_Pumpkins_album%29#Personnel

[14] http://web.stargate.net/soundgarden/articles/guitarworld_5-94.shtml