Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger stood out among its contemporaries

Lliam Easterbrook – sonic archaeologist – brings you his finds from excursions into ancient record bins. Every week, only on Vinyl Dust-off.

By Lliam Easterbrook
[contributor]

During a trip in Victoria, I found a locally run record shop. Entering, I found a treasure trove of vinyl; in particular, one of my favourite albums of all time. Until now I didn’t know it existed in vinyl format. In other words, my reaction was TOTAL FUCKING GODHEAD BATMAN.

In a year that saw Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nevermind) knock the King of Pop down the charts and Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” “Alive,” and “Even Flow” (Ten) reign supreme on MTV (remember when MTV used to play music?), ’91 also produced a much lesser known, much less commercial grunge masterpiece: Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger.

Released Oct. 8, 1991, Badmotorfinger represents Soundgarden’s most hard-hitting material. What it lacks in dark sonic psychedelia (you’ll get that with ’94’s Superunknown), it more than makes up for in gritty, loud, seething metal. Added to the line-up is Ben Shepherd, who brings a songwriting touch, making many of the songs on Badmotorfinger punchier, weirder, and more cohesive than ’89’s heavy but largely unfocused Louder than Love.

At nearly an hour long, songs like the backwards sounding “Rusty Cage” (a song Johnny Cash would later cover), the anthemic “Outshined,” and the droning, “Jesus Christ Pose” deliver a metallic ferocity the Seattle punk scene lacked at the time. Here Soundgarden embodies the best of all rock worlds: the power of metal, the punch of punk, and the cohesiveness of pop.

Chris Cornell’s soaring, ethereal vocals seem otherworldly. No one in rock sings with more power. Kim Thayil’s wild, screeching guitar sounds like it’s playing him (he’s one of Rolling Stone’s top 100 guitarists). Shepherd plays his bass so low, so badass, you’ll think your speakers will explode. And Matt Cameron (now in Pearl Jam and the newly reformed Soundgarden) hits his kit just as hard — and in my opinion more precisely, than John Bonham ever did. The guitar tunings are inventively strange, the time signatures insanely unpredictable. No wonder Mike McCready wore a Badmotorfinger t-shirt in pretty much every photograph in 1991.

Cornell’s lyrics are colourful — even if those colours are only shades of black. Circling diverse experiential possibilities, they serve to thrash the bigotry and narrow-mindedness of rightist thinkers, and bring the listener into the Gen X realm of cynicism and disdain for authority. “Jesus Christ Pose,” a song in which the accompanying video was banned by MTV, garnered much controversy by religious types for its depiction of the crucifix and crucifixion as a modern semblance symbol. The song is about false idols idealizing a gone symbol. When Cornell sings, “And you swear to me you don’t want to be my slave/ But you’re staring at me like I, like I need to be saved, saved,” he seems to be saying that people in the limelight use the cross for arbitrary and sometimes fallacious reasons.

Badmotorfinger’s album art is a razor-like helicopter blade with a spark plug in the middle. Musically, it follows suit. It is a workhorse album that conjures heavy, colourful images — even if sometimes ambiguous. The music hits the listener like a sonic boom; the lyrics take him “to the sky.”

Enter the garden of sound.

Play it loud. Play it proud.