Between Kim Thayil's Sabbath-style hypnoriffs and Chris Cornell's keening, Robert Plant-like tenor, Soundgarden are generally written off by alternative fans as just a smarter-than-average metal band. After all, how much was there to "Rusty Cage" or "Outshined" beyond dark, sludgy and tricky Zeppélinesque time changes?
But it's been easy to miss the subtler aspects of Soundgarden in the din of their sledgehammer instrumental attack. As a result,
Super-unknown will likely come as a shock to a lot of people – and not just because it offers more than heavy guitars and vocal heroics. For all the aural excitement provided by the surfer psychedelia of "My Wave" or the Beatlesque balladry of "Black Hole Sun," the album's real thrills have more to do with emotional content than stylistic flourishes. At its best,
Super-unknown offers a more harrowing depiction of alienation and despair than anything on
In Utero.Take "Mailman," for example. At first glance, this seems to be just another psychokiller number, with Cornell moaning lines like "I'm the dirt beneath your feet/The most important fool you forgot to see" as overdriven guitars tick ominously behind him. But rather than build to the expected payoff, the song focuses instead on the inchoate menace of its protagonist's threats and promises, a device made all the more unsettling by the sexual undercurrent implicit in Cornell's delivery of the chorus: "I know I'm headed for the bottom/But I'm riding you all the way." It's a genuinely scary performance, in large part because it doesn't offer the listener any release; by the song's end, we're still trapped in its vortex of malice and intimidation.
Soundgarden seem to glory in this method-acting approach to songwriting, happily accepting the contradictions within each character's view. Just look at how easily "My Wave" moves from the libertarian sentiments of the verse to the aggressive territoriality of the song's "keep it off my wave" chorus, presenting the view that doing your own thing is fine so long as you do it elsewhere. Yet rather than point up the fallacy in the protagonist's thinking, the music backs him up, shifting from a stuttering, jackhammer syncopation on the verse to an almost blissful psychedelic groove on the chorus. This, in other words, is the world as seen by the surfer; any attempt to impose a moral upon it is left entirely to the listener.
In a lesser band's hands, that approach could easily turn into an aesthetic copout, much as some gangsta rappers try to excuse the blood lust in their music by calling it "reporting." But Soundgarden aren't interested in making moral judgements so much as conveying a sense of the feelings at play in these songs, be they as simple as the idiot bliss bubbling through the infectious rhythms of "Spoonman" or as complex and consuming as the abject despair described in the mournful cadences of "Fell on Black Days." An
