Chris Cornell - Euphoria Morning CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

metaphysics and Sturm und Drang of his previous engagement, Cornell proffers sentiments worthy of sonnets. The first song (and first single), "Can't Change Me," is as rhapsodically gorgeous as pop gets, putting a spin on true love that any reprobate slacker can relate to: "She's going to change the world/But she can't change me/Suddenly I can see everything that's wrong with me/But what can I do?/I'm the only thing I really have at all." Cornell unveils a desire to be reckoned with as an openly wounded and unabashedly portentous rock balladeer. At its most musically and lyrically resolute, this passion results in heart wringers on the order of "Can't Change Me" and "Preaching the End of the World," both writ on a sonic canvas large enough to fit all the stars, moons and planets in the heavens. In "Preaching," Cornell displays a ferocity from somewhere halfway between Vegas and the twilight zone while singing of the need to find that special friend for the apocalypse.

Cornell's Godzillian tenor has always been one of the true wonders of this rock & roll age. It sounds like nothing so much as the roar of a fallen soulman who punched, scratched and kicked his way out of some holy-roller church basement to grow punk-rock fangs, conquer the world and then cry about it later. Nobody does lamentation and melancholia more furiously than Cornell - think of Temptation David Ruffin's pipes grafted onto Iggy Pop's zeal. On the church-piano-saturated "When I'm Down," the singer gets to make his R&B and gospel yearnings outright explicit. On his Jeff Buckley elegy, "Wave Goodbye," he marries funk and prog rock as benightedly as the Artist ever has.

Cornell, Johannes and Shneider have woven a formidable delicacy and intricacy into each song. The raucous tom drumming in "Can't Change Me" puts the savagery we associate with early Motown back into pure pop; the mixture of digital tricknology and acoustic- and vintage-electric-guitar sounds on "Flutter Girl" honors Cornell's ardor for Sgt. Pepper's. In the duo from Eleven, Cornell has wisely chosen comrades who can get their heads around his outer limits and fluently speak the vocabulary he's nicked from his Soundgarden self - weird tunings, odd meters, hurdy-gurdy contrapuntality, science-fiction-sc