SUPERUNKNOWN

(1994, a&m)

A scrawl of burning trees turned on their heads. A mouth opened freakishly wide in a silent scream. If someone had told you Soundgarden’s fourth album was a slasher movie, then based on the sleeve, you’d have believed it. “The cover kind of suggests the dark side of the unknown,” said bassist Ben Shepherd. “Like, when you look at a forest, you don’t know what’s in there, but it’s somehow appealing to go in.”

The band, too, were in uncharted waters as they recorded at Seattle’s Bad Animals studio over the summer of 1993. With early producer Terry date gone, Michael Beinhorn brought bold ideas, flavouring the material with a techno influence, urging Cornell to study Frank Sinatra’s honeyed phrasing for Black Hole Sun and forcing the band to perform each song until they were “sick and tired of it”.

For their own part, Soundgarden were making what Cornell said was “one of the most dramatic shifts in what we were doing musically”. There was barely a hint of the early punk spittle, and with all four members contributing to writing, the 15-song track-list alighted on everything from Half’s pseudo-raga to Head Down’s hat-tip to The Beatles (“When you look deep inside Soundgarden,” Thayil told Guitar World, “there’s a little Ringo wanting to get out”). These were complex, mathematical songs, with dropped guitar tunings, time signatures darting between 15/8 (Limo Wreck) and 6/4 (Fell On Black Days), and a brittle mix. Yet there was cohesion, Shepherd viewing the collection as “a collage, all in the same jungle, all in the same solar system”.

No commercial sell-out, then. But Soundgarden wouldn’t stay unknown for long. Steaming into a market softened up by Badmotorfinger, this fourth album was a multi-platinum smash and Grammynominated critical darling, still so beloved in the post-millennium that it was reissued and performed in full.

Immortality started here, but so too, no doubt, did Cornell’s slow descent. The early signposts to his unravelling reveal themselves in dark couplets about

‘crawling back to the womb to die’ (Let Me Drown) and executing your boss (Mailman). But perhaps it’s best just to enjoy this dark ride through the forest. HY