 |  | I Went Looking for New Music and Found Soundgarden |  |
While just graduating from high school I was looking for something different musically and Soundgarden was what I found and they turned me on to tons of other bands. The Seattle big "grunge" movement was happening with bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, and the Meat Puppets, changing the course of music for good, away from the typical and boring metal bands.
This album is in the same vein as their previous release of two E.P.'s combined: Screaming Life" & "Fopp. It had a raw, garage sound that I loved. They got compared to the great Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, which I can hear the influence of, but Soundgarden make a more modern version adding their own "grunge" style.
My favorite songs on this album are "Hands All Over", "Loud Love" and "Ugly Truth" which all display Chris Cornell's screeching and intense vocals over Kim Thayil's experimental, yet bold guitar riffs. I also liked the funny, yet in a more punk-ish style of "Full On Kevin's Mom" showing humor and irony.
April 22, 2008 | | A near-forgotten classic! | |
For the opposition: All of these songs are sludgity sludgity sludge that could've been played by any sludge band.
For the defense: Who cares? It's good! These are great riffs! It's not as intelligent as later albums, no, but it's still quite good. I mean, these riffs are so damn cool! "Ugly Truth", "Hands All Over", "Gun", "Power Trip", and "Get on the Snake" all have uber-riffs. "Ugly Truth" and "Hands All Over" are especially awesome, because of Chris Cornell's charismatic vocals. They also send up hair metal sex-god stupid stuff on "Full on Kevin's Mom", "Loud Love", and "Big Dumb Sex", and I like all of them! They're really funny! "Full on Kevin's Mom" especially rules - Cornell does a very accurate parody of Robert Plant's crappy voice, and the guitar solo is awesome too. And there's this one part where it slows down, which is awesome, because they put more effort into structuring a goof track than the Eagles spent with "Hotel California". But "Loud Love" has a great intro full of lush, smooth, high-pitched guitar passages, before it becomes an amusingly sleazy heavy near-boogie. And once again, that is a super riff. And the chorus is funny! "Can't resist loud looooove..." Plus "Big Dumb Sex" is even funnier than either of those two combined, and has a better riff. You know those stupid metaphoric sex power-ballads all the hair bands were forcing on people in the '80s? This is the antithesis of that. Oh yeah, and speaking of hair-metal parody hilarity, "Full On (Reprise)" takes this generic power-ballad riff and has Chris Cornell and all the other guys singing "Full ooooon... Kevin's moooom..." over and over again. Good times. And for a change I'm not saying that sarcastically. Now, the bad news is that Soundgarden has this annoying habit of filling their albums out with songs no one freakin' needs. In this case, we get three songs that any sub-par metal band could've pulled out of the air and called their own. Specifically, I'm talking about "No Wrong No Right", "I Awake", and "Uncovered". Out of them, only "Uncovered" really sucks, but all three are about as useful as an appendix. And yes, I'm aware that scientists recently discovered appendixes have uses, but I have, like, no interest in science. English, history, and world myth all the way! Oh yeah, and music. I kinda like that stuff, too. But the album? Probably the most underrated in Soundgarden's history!
April 12, 2008In my humble opinion, this cd is good but not great. If you like new rock, you should like it. I stick with older stuff like Led Zep or Deep Purple, they have stood the test of time. If you want to discover the band, you should go with "Badmotorfinger" or "Superunknown", that would be a better choice I believe.
January 30, 2008| | | Please relase a remastered version of this! | |
This is a classic must have CD. They really need to release a remastered version like every other band is doing now with their older releases.
March 30, 2007| | | The best Soundgarden Album | |
Probably not a sentiment shared by many, and I won't go into an excrutiating critique, but in my mind this is their best album. Songs like "Hands All Over," "Ugly Truth," "Uncovered," "Loud Love," and "Heretic (which did not appear on the album)" represent the band at their finest. Don't get me wrong, their subsequent albums were superb as well (even the relatively benign "Down On The Upside..."), but Chris' air raid siren vocals, Hiro's foundation crushing bass, and Kim's wailing guitar placed this as one of the best metal albums of all time.
January 19, 2007More reviews at Amazon.com ...
(48 reviews)