Photo: Chris Cuffaro
The 1990s began with a musical explosion in the form of Nirvana’s Nevermind, which sold 30,000,000 units worldwide. Glam rock was all but forgotten overnight, and a new wave of bands who took their cues from punk were hustled into the spotlight.
On their 1991 album Badmotorfinger, Seattle band Soundgarden threaded a needle between heavy metal and garage rock, led by the incredible pipes of frontman Chris Cornell.
1994’s Superunknown found them broadening their scope: Cornell could still scream like no one else on the planet, but tracks like ‘Spoonman’ managed to be both poppier, (despite a skewiff time signature), and weirder, thanks to bass player Ben Shepherd, who provided backing vocals, and its subject, a real-life spoons player who appears intermittently on the track.
Listening thirty years on, I’m also impressed by the psychedelic swirl of ‘Head Down’, one of two songs where Shepherd has sole writing credit.
Superunknown is hugely ambitious, running through 15 tracks over an hour and ten minutes. In totality it can be exhausting - there are maybe one too many dirges - but the highs are incredibly high, like the mega-hit ‘Black Hole Sun’, or my personal favourite ‘My Wave’, one of two songs co-written by guitarist Kim Thayil.
It packs everything great about the band into one song: Cornell’s howl as well as his mellower tones, lyrics that alternate between aggressive and new age, a few brief psychedelic freakouts, and an abundance of world-class, irresistible riffs.
Hearing the way Thayil, Shepherd, and drummer Matt Cameron, let loose on the song’s main progression, then lock in behind Cornell when he starts to sing, still brings me so much joy.
Eight months after Superunknown hit shelves, another Seattle band called Pearl Jam released their third album Vitalogy. Like the former, it found them taking the opportunity to get much weirder.
The slick riffs and long durations of Ten were firmly in the rearview mirror. Just three years after releasing chart-friendly singles like ‘Alive’, and ‘Even Flow’, they were outputting things like the meandering, accordion-led ‘Bugs’.
When Pearl Jam rocked out, the results were much scrappier than they had been. Vitalogy is probably best remembered for the ballads ‘Better Man’ and ‘Nothingman’, but to my mind the best songs are the album's first three, starting with ‘Last Exit’.
There’s also ‘Spin the Black Circle’ a whirling dervish dedicated to the pleasures of vinyl records, which finds Vedder in tonsil-shredding form. Then comes ‘Not For You’, a song that could serve as a warning to casual fans, as Vedder wails “This is not for you”.
In between Superunknown and Vitalogy, in June of 1994, San Diego outfit Stone Temple Pilots put out Purple, their second album. Despite being perceived critically as riding the coattails of other bands labelled ‘grunge’, the album debuted at number one on the Billboard charts.
‘Interstate Love Song’ was a huge hit, but its second single ‘Vasoline’ is the one that still sounds great to me, revolving around a two-note riff that’s so simple it almost feels like a sly joke. The song is buoyed by acoustic and percussive elements, and Scott Weiland’s restrained vocal, breathless rushing between verse and chorus, until before you know it, it’s over.
