ULTRAMEGA OK
(1988, SST)
If grunge was the bastard child of Led Zeppelin and The Stooges, then Soundgarden were the midwives who delivered it, kicking and sneering, into the world.
The four-piece were marrying the bombast of metal with the kick of punk while Kurt Cobain was still scrawling Iron Maiden logos in his schoolbooks. They had signaled their intent with an appearance on the influential Deep Six compilation and a handful of singles and EPs. But it would be their debut album, Ultramega OK, that crystallised their sound and drew up the road map that grunge would follow.
What’s astonishing about Ultramega OK 30 years on is how fully formed the band that made it sound. All the pieces were already in place: Kim Thayil’s protean guitar grind, Chris Cornell’s banshee bombast, the near-tribal rhythms of drummer Matt Cameron and original bassist Hiro Yamamoto. Whatever nasty chemicals they were putting in the water up in Seattle, they sure as hell were working.
In the era of Guns N’ Roses and U2, Soundgarden sounded like they had been beamed in from another, altogether grubbier universe. There was zero concession to MTV gloss here – even if the budgets would have allowed it, the band themselves were too stubborn and contradictory to allow it. With its psychedelic undertones, Flower could have been a Beatles song were it not for the air of belligerent sarcasm that hung over it,
All Your Lies didn’t sound like nails scraping down a blackboard by accident.
This contrariness extended to the bands that Soundgarden drew on as influence. The monolithic Behind The Wheel was what Black Sabbath would have sounded like with Robert Plant singing. Cool as hell now, but a ballsy move at a time when neither of those bands could get arrested. But then Soundgarden were an outsider band from an outsider town, and they knew a kindred spirit when they saw one.
In the great scheme of things, Ultramega OK amounted to zip – it barely registered on the radars of all but the hippest underground music aficionado – but it set the Seattle music scene on a path that no one involved could have ever envisioned, and set Soundgarden themselves on the road to immortality. DE