Published on Dec 9, 1998
No other cassette has come close to doing the damage that
Louder Than Love did to my music collection. The year-1989.
I was still teethering between my ‘keepin’ it real’ skater pals and
my pop-metal cravings. Let’s see, Poison, White Lion, Winger,
Stryper, Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth
or…Def Leppard. A bridge had to be burned.
In comes Circus magazine. In a small, isolated article, I read a
positively glowing review of
Louder Than Love, from this group called Soundgarden. The
review was so powerful, I went out and picked up the cassette. The
power of the written word-perfect- a perfect example of its power,
mainly due to the fact that there was no way in hell that
Louder Than Love would be played on the radio stations.
So, armed with that cassette, my friend and I retreated back to
my room where we engaged in the usual Saturday afternoon rituals.
Metal Gear on the Nintendo, a small bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and a
big ass glass of Mountain Dew. The moment I pushed ‘play,’ a path
would be paved. A path that, due to my then Beavis-like tendencies,
resulted in the smashing of nearly two-thirds of my hair-metal
cassette tape collection.
Such baptismals are never pretty. And
Louder Than Love was as pretty as a medieval bludgeoning
instrument. Unlike some of the speed metal that I had,
Louder Than Love‘s pace was rather slow. It felt like
sludges of lava were in my room (and that was before I discovered
alcohol). For a pace so slow,
Louder Than Love sounded inexpliciably heavy.
Credit guitarist Kim Thayil for creating a bombastic guitar
assault. The heshen-stomp of “Get On The Snake,” the pulverizing
“Ugly Truth” and the sinister “No Wrong No Right” were all
primitive guitar assaults. Though Thayil would grow more
sophisticated in later releases, dabbling in psychedellic textures,
he never sounded as forceful as he did on this album, with the
exception of one or two songs on their newer releases.
Louder Than Love was the last album recorded with Hiro
Yamamoto, the former bassist of the now-defunct band. Possibly
sensing the band wasn’t going far, financial wise, Yamamoto opted
to quit the band and finish his Master’s degree. Ben Shepard
replaced Yamamoto and quickly became one of the most viable members
of the band.
But like most heavy metal bands, the voice is the all-important
facet. And Chris Cornell had a throat that could emit a noise
similar to a civil defense siren. The highlight of the album comes
in the second song as Cornell cannons out a wail, then yells,
“Don’t touch me!” in the environmental-warning song, “Hands All
Over.”
Lyric-wise,
Louder Than Love was typical heavy-metal topics, with a more
lyrical approach. “Full On Kevin’s Mom” was a great ode to
hillbilly inbreeding. (Silly note, in 1989, my sister got married,
I gave her away, her husband’s name…you guessed it, Kevin) That
song made me squirm more than any other song on the album. And the
misunderstood lyric of the year, for that year, went to “Power
Trip”. Cornell’s drunken, ID raging persona was slurring, “I wanna
be King” in a way that for awhile I swore he was saying, “I want to
be gay!” Needless to say, that chorus made my friend and I drop the
Nintendo pads and hit the rewind button. Is that what I thought he
said?
Excluding the “Full On(Reprise)” ending, “Louder Than Love”
concluded with one of the most misunderstood songs in heavy metal.
The title, “Big Dumb Sex” should have told listeners not to take
the song too seriously. As it was a joke against most
crotch-grabbing, frat boy types of people. The chorus said it all:
“Yeah, I know what to do!/ I’m gonna fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you,
fuck you!” Slap a ‘Parental Advisory’ sticker on that baby,
pronto.
All in all, about $40 worth of cassettes were destroyed after
listening to
Louder Than Love. Devoid of any market-grabbing tactics,
packed full of primitive aggression,
Louder Than Love made me want to find out about Mother Love
Bone. As well as a favorite of mine, Kurt Cobain said that it was
one of his favorite albums. It’s hard not to see some of
Love in
Nevermind. And honestly, I don’t think that groundbreaking
album would have sounded the same had it not been for
Louder Than Love.