Apparently, it’s 1996 Again.
King Animal by Soundgarden
“I’ve been away for too long!” brays Soundgarden vocalist Chris Cornell on the opening track of the quartet’s most recent album, King Animal. It’s a fitting proclamation for a band whose last studio album was released 17 years ago. And while King Animal doesn’t pack quite the same punch as Soundgarden’s seminal works like Badmotorfinger and Superunknown, it does demonstrate a very admirable devotion to the band’s original aesthetic while also representing a refreshing change from today’s hyper-polished rock landscape to a more raw, primal sound.
Having formed in the early 80s, the band split in 1997, only to reunite 13 years later, much to the delight of those of us who were teenagers during their heyday and have since longed for a return to the stripped-down growl of actual bands playing actual instruments (and yes, I am aware of how cliched and unfair and whiny it is to complain about how shitty rock music has become, that it’s more indicative of my own age than of the actual contemporary musicscape, blah blah, but–Jesus Christ– have you listened to the radio lately??). Thankfully, King Animal is as raucous and gritty as their previous work, full of the same kind of moody imagery–drying blood, animal bones, etc. There are instances in which some of these images don’t really come together as well as they should, like “Taree,” with its enigmatic references to bloody needles and tilted shadows, but then that’s sort of always been grunge’s hallmark: it gives the listener the tools to craft meaning from a tapestry of dismal, disparate images.
Compositionwise, the songs follow Soundgarden’s tradition of power chords, bluesy riffs, and peculiar time signatures; the band is especially fond of riffs that run a few beats too long “Outshined” from ’91′s Badmotorfinger. In this case, you’ve got “By Crooked Steps,” with its pummeling and intentionally uneven momentum, as well as “Eyelid’s Mouth,” a calm, mid-tempo number that calls to mind much of the band’s early music and makes for an excellent driving-to-work-in-the-morning song.
However, beyond these things there is little substance to be found in King Animal, mainly just a lot of the same stuff that made Down on the Upside, the band’s last studio release, so underwhelming; As Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman notes, King Animal starts off with a bang but then, just like Down, devolves into a kind of checklist to make sure that each tune corresponds stylistically to one of their previous hits. And while the results here aren’t terrible–if “Bones of Birds” is their attempt to recreate “Black Hole Sun,” then that’s fine with me; at the end of the day, they’re both good tunes–it is decidedly uninteresting.
Yet, I don’t think this is a fault of Soundgarden’s so much as a fault of the genre. After all, there’s a reason that grunge met the same fate as disco and nu-metal and that cringe-inducing swing band movement of the mid 90s (Squirrell Nut Zippers, Cherry Poppin Daddies, etc.): it ultimately collapses under the weight of its own formula. Of course, maybe this is just the 16-year-old in me talking, maybe I still want Soundgarden to be relevant and hip and artistically viable. Because hey–Nirvana? Pearl Jam? Helmet? Those guys were really good at what they did, and it made a lot of sense at the time. But that’s sort of the thing: this isn’t the 90s anymore, and as much as our hearts may leap at the notion of grunge’s return, our ears tell a different story.
Koi No Yokan by the Deftones
The Deftones finally discovered their wheelhouse with 2010′s Diamond Eyes: it’s in the cross-section between the heavy, brooding guitar riffs characteristic of their earlier work and large-scale elegaic ballads. It was a formula that worked well for the Sacremento-based quintent, both artistically and financially, and so I’m guessing this why they’ve essentially rehashed it on 2012′s Koi No Yokan, only this time the results are much more mixed.
Don’t get me wrong, Koi No Yokan (a Japanese term for a kind of love at first sight) is good, maybe even very good, but that’s pretty much it. Which, you could argue, is perfectly acceptable. I mean, you can’t expect every album to be a homerun. It’s just that, as in the case of Soundgarden, the things that make it very good don’t really have anything to do with the album itself but rather the way in which the band has rehashed their previous work.
The album begins promisingly with “Swerve City,” a fast-paced heavy-hitter whose power is in the juxtapostion of menacing riffs and elegant, ethereal vocals. A lot of this you can attribute to producer Nick Raskulinecz, who has worked with such bands as the Foo Fighters, Rush, and Alice in Chains. But there’s also the Deftones’ penchant for catchy hooks and melodies, as well as their ability to turn simple song structures into deceptively vibrant sound tapestries. All of these things are held together by vocalist Chino Moreno’s voice, a frenzied combination of angry shriek and sensual purr. There’s a vulnerability in it that gives resonance to the songs in its haunting intimation of sexual violence.
From here, though, the album seems to falter. Between the over-the-top grandstanding of songs like “Romantic Dreams” or the stuttering tempo of “Poltergeist,” Koi No Yokan lacks focus. Or rather, it has too many foci, too many things it’s trying to accomplish, which isn’t necessarily unforgivable, except that those things aren’t new for the band. In this way, Koi No Yokan becomes predictable and, near the middle, sluggish as the band struggles to make sense of its own sound. It’s a good listen, one that newer fans might enjoy but that doesn’t really showcase their true potential.
