king animal

(2012, Vertigo)

Soundgarden’s sixth album was a miracle late birth. Few had seen the reunion coming, due to Cornell often telling journalists that 1996’s Down On The Upside was the perfect full-stop (“and then we walked away”), and that “for us to do anything else would risk tarnishing the legacy”. Even then, new material seemed a dream too far. But King Animal crept up on the band by degrees. “If you get the four of us in a room together,” Thayil told Guitar World, “we’re not just going to whip out Outshined, we’re more inclined to plug in and start pulling out some new riffs.”

King Animal could not be the work of any other band. The slippery meters. The scrawls of heavily processed guitar. The doom-portending down-tuned riffs. And that voice, still thrilling and feral, painting these songs a jet-black violently opposite to the sleeve’s snow-driven pile of animal skulls. It wasn’t an easy record – bassist Ben Shepherd recalled that the band

“drove ourselves mad” as they laboured over By Crooked Steps – but moments like Rowing and lead single Been Away Too Long brought vindication, while the album title caught the swagger within the camp (“There’s something about it that’s confident,” Cornell told Fuse. “Sort of like taking ownership of who we are”).

With memories of Cornell’s alarming 2009 solo album Scream still fresh, many critics welcomed King Animal’s hand of familiar calling cards (“It makes a surprisingly good fist of plugging back into the sound that made them the moodiest and heaviest of the grunge bands, ”noted dave Simpson). others wondered whether the line-up should have dreamed a little bigger during their 13-year layoff, with Pitchfork sniffing that

“it sounds like the album they would have churned out in 1998”, while Slant magazine damningly concluded that “they’ve returned as a slightly more conservative version of what made them famous in the first place”.

With a seventh album already initiated at the time of Cornell’s death, and the surviving members referring to

“six solid tunes”, perhaps we’ll get one last howl from beyond the grave. For now, though, King Animal is their flawed but often fantastic swansong. HY