Alternative
Kim Thayil has given the first serious hints about how the record he, drummer Matt Cameron and bassist Ben Shepherd are building from recordings made with Chris Cornell before the singer’s death in 2017 will sound. He explained it in an interview with KOMO News: if you can imagine a lullaby paired with psychedelia, he says, that gets pretty close.
There’s still no release date.
The songs were essentially written, and the vocals and part of the drums were already there, but not the full performances; rather than starting from a demo and building up layers, the three of them have had to take the material apart and put it back together piece by piece. Thayil describes it as almost «forensic» work, and admits the pleasure of re-listening to hours of material coexists with the pressure of doing justice to a friend’s work. Terry Date, who’d already produced «Louder Than Love» (1989) and «Badmotorfinger» (1991), is on production, with Joe Barresi handling the mix.
Soundgarden were the first band from the Seattle scene to sign to a major label, in 1988, after stints with Sub Pop and SST. They used open tunings and unusual time signatures — «Spoonman» and «Outshined» in 7/4, «My Wave» in 5/4 — and carried traces of Black Sabbath and progressive rock. «Badmotorfinger» (1991) and «Superunknown» (1994) sold millions of copies. They broke up in 1997, reunited in 2010, and left «King Animal» (2012) as the last record released in Cornell’s lifetime.
There’s a specific reason these recordings have taken nine years to get this far: a legal dispute over ownership of the material between the three musicians and the singer’s heir kept everything locked down, and only once it was resolved could they get back into the studio. What’s holding up the release now isn’t musical but contractual: so many years have passed that the label agreements had expired and have had to be renegotiated from scratch.
Text by Berta Sagristà