TALENT VS. MYTH
Cobain gets all the press, but Cornell gets it done
Heresy alert!
Seattle rock’s greatest talent isn’t Kurt Cobain.
Don’t get me wrong. He’s an icon and a groundbreaker. More, he’s a figure of such intense fascination and frustration, it’s small wonder we’re even more transfixed by him 20 years after his passing than we were during his blunt and vexed life. Extra proof arrived with the lauded, recent HBO documentary on his inner life, “Montage of Heck,” which arrives on DVD in November.
At the same time, our unending obsession with Cobain has wildly overshadowed another Seattle force who, for years, has mined a different path, with distinct results.
For more than two decades, Chris Cornell — of Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog and Audioslave, not to mention many solo projects — has churned out work of consistent brilliance and challenge.
Like anyone, Cornell has had his fumbles. I call to the stand “Scream,” his electronic belly-flop of an album with Timbaland in 2009. But, on the whole, Cornell has displayed a vocal command, and a songwriting breadth, beyond not only Cobain, but the other most prominent Seattle powerhouse: Pearl Jam, who can fall into the same groove, with predictable results.
This week, Cornell takes his talent to a new level. On Friday, he’ll issue the fourth studio album under his own name — “Higher Truth” — a work of such passion, focus, and chops that it begs a central question: What matters more — talent or being an icon?
“Higher Truth” highlights a variety of aspects to Cornell’s work that put his talent in a class by itself. For one, he’s still growing at age 51. “Truth” gives a hard shake to many of our expectations about who Cornell should be. The man who blasted to fame on the most yowling of metal shouts, fired by the most grinding of grunge riffs, based all of his latest songs on acoustic guitars. While plenty of electric instruments come into play, ballads ground them all.
It’s hardly the first time Cornell has unplugged. In 2011, he toured with just a lone guitar, a jaunt captured on a stellar album that year, “Songbook.” That project shone a perfect light on another area where Cornell excels to a degree beyond Cobain or even Pearl Jam’s estimable Eddie Vedder — as a singer.
Cornell remains one of rock’s most physically powerful and emotionally resonant vocalists. His finest performances have an operatic drama. On the new album, he adds nuance to that by more often singing close, an apt approach given the intimate subject matter at hand. Many of his new lyrics address a relationship that went violently off the rails. As sweetly as Cornell sometimes sounds, his words betray an anger best expressed in the refrain, “I can’t wait to never be with you again,” which he delivers with an ironic croon on “Murder of Blue Skies.”
Cornell shows equal range as a melodist. The tunes on “Higher Truth” have the appeal and variety of pop.
In such aspects, Cobain often flagged. Both as a singer, and writer, the Nirvana frontman had a limited number of tricks. He really had just one sound, revealed on his band’s only wondrous work, “Nevermind.” Nirvana’s music in its wake already seemed like a rehash, offering little promise for the future.
Of course, you don’t need a long legacy to deserve rocklegend status. The Sex Pistols, N.W.A. and Guns N’ Roses had similarly single-minded styles and abbreviated periods of brilliance. If anything, that intense a focus, and concentrated an output, stoked their myths.
At the same time, it would be nice, now and then, to throw more light on a nose-to-the-grindstone artist like Cornell — not to mention ones like Richard Thompson and Marianne Faithfull. They’re all stars who’ve put out so much good work, so consistently, we often forget to tell them just how much they’re worth.