Saturday, October 8, 2016

Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger turns 25

Soundgarden released a great album, Badmotorfinger, 25 years ago today.

My favorite song on the album is "Outshined." When I made a list of "the 40 greatest grunge songs," I ranked "Outshined" #3. I wrote:

I can't think of a more brilliant musical expression of raw testosterone than this.

I love the way all the instruments and vocals move together on "Show me the power child, I'd like to say / That I'm down on my knees today" — like a machine with perfectly synchronized interlocking parts.

Focus on the interlude that starts just before 3:00. On the surface, there's not much going on here — no guitar solo or key change or anything. But a gentle little passage like this, in a song that's otherwise anything but gentle, is the kind of thing that elevates a song, and distinguished Soundgarden from 99% of grunge bands.



The album begins with the relentless "Rusty Cage":




The band will be releasing two special editions of the album next month:
The 2-CD package and the “Super Deluxe” version both include studio outtakes and live cuts, most of them previously unreleased. In all, the “Super Deluxe” contains 109 tracks (79 of them previously unreleased) in addition to two DVDs, capturing a 1992 concert at Seattle’s Paramount Theatre, and the band’s 1992 Motorvision home video.
Here's an extended version of "Slaves and Bulldozers," from a concert after they reunited a few years ago:

1 comments:

Graham Powell said...

Aside from the great songs, this album and "Superunknown" had two of the best album TITLES of all time.