For those who pay more than the barest amount of attention to this blog (which, I believe, includes me and no one else. I’m totally okay with that) it might be obvious that something is…missing. It’s time to rectify that. See, I talk about music a whole bunch ‘round these here parts and two of the albums I’ve been talking about happened to show up on the same week (at least for me, I don’t know how it worked for people who don’t pre-order things[1]). As such, I find it impossible to talk about them separately. So we need to have a discussion of Soundgarden’s King Animal and a discussion of the Lovehammers’ Set Fire.
It was interesting leaving these albums until November. By the time they hit I pretty much knew that the best albums of 2012 were going to be Local H’s Hallelujah! I’m a Bum and Sons of Bill’s Sirens in one order or another and I was pretty sure that Scott Lucas & the Married Men’s Blood Half Moon was going to be in the three spot.[2] If there were any two potential game changers, however, Soundgarden and the Lovehammers had to be atop the list.[3]
Soundgarden, for those keeping track, is fucking Soundgarden. They are, quite literally, the most important band in my personal history. Superunknown is my all-time best album and Badmotorfinger is one of the all-time greats as well. They’ve been not-Soundgarden for a long time, though, which was always a potential pitfall. Also, prior to the release of King Animal the only Soundgarden song we’d heard was “Live to Rise” off of The Avengers soundtrack. Somehow “Live to Rise” managed to come off as “You Know My Name,” which Chris Cornell did for the Casino Royale soundtrack plus the guys from Soundgarden but still somehow less awesome. This isn’t a knock against “You Know My Name” because that’s a great song. It’s basically that “Live to Rise” was nondescript. Soundgarden is not supposed to be nondescript. By the same token, though, I saw Soundgarden at the UIC Pavilion right after I moved back to Chicago last year and it was fucking awesome. They didn’t play a single song that’s been recorded since 1996 and went so deep that I had to listen to Ultramega OK on the way home to figure out what the fuck they’d played for a couple of the songs, which were “Mood for Trouble” and “Flower,” if I recall.
The Lovehammers are a little harder to parse. The self-titled album they put out the capitalize on Marty Casey’s post-Rock Star: INXS fame is awesome, but it’s more of a greatest hits album than a true studio album. 2003’s Murder on My Mind is at least a top 20 all-time album in my book, though.[4] L’Strange is obviously an indie album from a point just before it was possible to do that in a way that didn't immediately advertise itself. Heavy Crown is an album that I consider good but not great, but it’s hard to explain. There aren’t really any songs I don’t like and “Black Angel (Not Gonna Be the One)” is legitimately awesome, as are “Your Time, My Time” and the title track. But I’m meh on the album as a whole. I saw the Lovehammers at Hammerfest in February, and then at both shows they did at the Beat Kitchen in…um, the fall-ish. I’m pretty much at the point where the Lovehammers have eclipsed Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers as the band I’ve seen many, many times and would be totally excited to see live again tomorrow. Basically, the Lovehammers are my Chicago Saw Doctors. I love everything about them except their albums as actual albums. Still, as the Saw Doctors demonstrated two years ago with the increasingly excellent-in-my-humble-opinion The Further Adventures of the Saw Doctors, it can happen.
Let’s talk expectation for a moment. The music industry has changed drastically since Soundgarden was one of the biggest bands in the world. Radio was still the most important aspect of any band’s advertising.[5]
The radio built buzz. I think that’s one of the key components that’s missing in my weird footnote musings on how nothing in music feels big anymore. DJ’s used to make big announcements and unveil the new single after building it for an hour or three. Then you’d have to wait to hear it again. Being able to go to YouTube any old time and see the official video or that reasonably-high-quality bootleg someone shot at a show last week isn’t the same. It’s still possible, however, to create buzz.
Soundgarden, I’m sad to say, did a terrible job of creating buzz for King Animal. I’ve been on their mailing list because, y’know, duh. Every once in a while I got an email about King Animal that came off as a press release from the label. It reminded me that, yes, a new Soundgarden album was coming up one of these days. It didn’t exactly convince me to care, though. So when I signed up for the pre-order of King Animal it was almost an afterthought.
The Lovehammers did a brilliant job of creating buzz. They did the Kickstarter thing through PledgeMusic, which is basically the same thing as Kickstarter, but Kickstarter has become the Kleenex of fundraising campaigns. Back in the day I participated in the pre-Kickstarter pre-order fundraiser for Heavy Crown and it was fine. I sent the band 15 bucks or whatever and several months later I got an autographed copy of Heavy Crown in the mail. I’m also well aware of the Kickstarter model and its benefits and limitations.
The Lovehammers didn’t use PledgeMusic in the standard Kickstarter model. They were clear from the very beginning that the album was actually almost done and they didn’t really need the money for studio time and all that stuff. Their idea, instead, was to use PledgeMusic as a fan site. Anyone who went in would get whatever they’d pay for in the end, but in the process they’d get updates and random stories from the band. I signed up at the $25 level to get an mp3 download of the new album and a t-shirt and then every week or so I got an email with the latest update. Sometimes the update was a new song. Sometimes the update was a recording of a really old song. Sometimes the update was a story.[6] I recognize that the process was somewhat intentionally manipulative, but by the same token it came across as organic and genuine and it worked. I was already prone to care about the Lovehammers before and over the course of their PledgeMusic campaign I felt progressively more connected to them.
It should be noted that the end result of Soundgarden and the Lovehammers pre-album advertising was the same. I bought a copy of King Animal and I bought a copy of Set Fire. I also bought a VIP ticket to the Set Fire release show at Joe’s last Saturday and a secondary market ticket to the Soundgarden show at the Riviera Theatre in January.[7] In the 2012 calendar year, then, I’ve given the Lovehammers or organizations related to the Lovehammers somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 for four concert tickets and a PledgeMusic campaign. I’ve spent about the same amount on Soundgarden-related albums and concert tickets. As such, it’s a bit of a wash. And if we learned anything from the stupid bullshit about registered voters v. enthusiastic voters in 2012, in the end a vote’s a vote and a dollar’s a dollar.
Still, on a purely emotional level I feel better about the Lovehammers stuff than the Soundgarden stuff. That’s the sort of thing that matters to some people. I also genuinely enjoyed being a part of the Lovehammers’ campaign because I felt like I really got something out of it. That matters on a fundamental level. Admittedly it probably matters more for people who aren’t me and in a situation where I’m not comparing the re-formation of one of the biggest bands of the ‘90s to a relentlessly local Chicago band. But for an indie band trying to make it big using Kickstarter…I’d recommend using the Lovehammers’ strategy.
So…let’s talk about the music itself.
I find reviews of King Animal fascinating. Most that I see seem to flog a King Animal-as-combination-of-Superunknown-and-Badmotorfinger-and-how-amazing-is-it-that-Soundgarden-still-has-the-magic combo. I’ll just link to this Gladstone piece at Cracked as an example of the genre, since I’m way too fucking lazy to look up the other ones I saw. Reviews like that are fascinating because, well, because I just don’t fucking see it. I got about four songs into King Animal and my main thought was, “Why would anyone listen to this since Superunknown already exists?” I believe that I posted an insta-review of the album on Facebook that basically said as much. The stuff that didn’t remind me of Superunknown, meanwhile, reminded me of Down on the Upside.
None of this is bad, mind you. King Animal is not a bad album. It’s just…it’s pretty much exactly what I’d expect for the mid-level threshold of the first major album released by a legendary band that’s been broken up for a decade and a half. Kim Thayil is there in all his glory. Chris Cornell’s lyrics are snappy. Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron are significantly better behind Cornell than the dudes that weren’t Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine were.[8] It’s basically an album that belongs somewhere on the same level as Down On the Upside in the Soundgarden library.
Comparing anything to Superunknown or Badmotorfinger is difficult at best. Both albums possessed a relentless, driving quality that few albums I’ve seen since could manage to duplicate. King Animal and, for that matter, Down on the Upside, tried to duplicate that quality but just plain didn’t. That doesn’t mean that they were bad or failures. It just means that they were made by a band that simply couldn’t achieve the heights they’d managed to achieve with two of the greatest albums of the ‘90s. Just listen to this version of “Slaves & Bulldozers.” It may well be the definitive Soundgarden song in the way it just pounds relentlessly through your ears and into your soul. I say this as someone who considers Superunknown superior to Badmotorfinger, by the way. I say this as someone who considers “Like Suicide” to be Soundgarden’s best song. “Slaves & Bulldozers” is the most Soundgarden of all Soundgarden songs.[9] Nothing on King Animal is even remotely close to “Slaves & Bulldozers.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I like it when bands try new things. I’ve been known, in fact, to get tired of bands who just do the same thing over and over and over again. That’s why, in the end, I wasn’t a big fan of Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers’ Unida Cantina. It just felt like the same album they’d been recording for the past several years and I wanted to see new things. But with Soundgarden…well…King Animal is just an inferior version of the three quintessential Soundgarden albums. That’s all there is to it.
I have a policy in life. If I’m listening to an album and all I can think about is how much more I’d prefer to listen to another album, then the album I’m listening to is probably not that great. That’s, ultimately, where King Animal ends up for me. It’s better than Audioslave, but it has a long way to go to reach the heights of the great Soundgarden albums of yesteryear.
So that brings us to the all-important question in the formulation of this particular post: is the new Lovehammers better than the new Soundgarden? The answer is a resounding, “Hell, yes.”
I have exactly two problems with the new Lovehammers album. The first is that it’s too short: nine songs, a live cover of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” and two alternate versions of songs that appeared earlier. I would have instantly dismissed it were it not for the fact that I’d already decided to accept Scott Lucas & the Married Men’s Blood Half Moon. Also, I love the Lovehammers’ version of “Baba,” so there’s that. Even so, the entirety of Set Fire is only about 43 minutes long, which is super short by LP standards. I’m also not overly enamored with the title track.
Still and all, eight excellent original songs, an excellent cover of one of the greatest rock songs of all time, and some other genuinely good stuff is nothing to sneeze at. It hits the all-important threshold of being something I’d prefer to listen to over various alternatives. It also means that I expect to spend more time listening to Set Fire than King Animal in the years to come. That has to count for something.[10]
With all that said, though, neither Set Fire nor King Animal were game changing albums. Hallelujah! I’m a Bum and Sirens are just too goddamn good to be overcome. I’m totally okay with that and I think you should be, too. Because it means that, from what I can recall at this exact moment, two albums with some really good songs came out in 2012, four good albums came out in 2012, and two albums that will end up somewhere in my greatest of all time list came out in 2012. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
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[1]This is actually an interesting thing to me. Soundgarden’s King Animal hit the streets on the traditional Tuesday and did the pre-release mp3 thing on Monday. The Lovehammers sent their pre-orderers copies on a Thursday. Back in the day albums came out on Tuesday. If you paid attention to such things, in fact, there were certain days when certain things were released. Music and video games came out on Tuesdays, movies came out on Fridays, etc. This was a logistics thing: send the trucks out on Monday, the overnight (or closing) crew puts them on the shelf and then wait for the buzz if the product in question was important enough. That sort of thing is almost completely unnecessary for most things these days. Digital distribution has not necessary killed the release-date-buzz-time thing, but it has certainly put it in a stranglehold.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about that. Nothing feels…big, for lack of a better word, anymore. However, that might just be me, as I simply don’t go to stores to get things that I can download now. There’s no point. But what that means, at least for the stuff I pre-order, is that I get an email that says, “Hey, your thing is here,” or, if I ordered the special autographed edition, I find it in the mailbox.
[2] We haven’t talked about Blood Half Moon and I kind of want to get around to doing that. My main problem is that it’s short. My main praise is that it’s amazing. It’s eight tracks, one of which is a nine-minute Johnny Cash cover. But those eight songs add up to more than 45 minutes of music, which is good enough for me to call it an LP.
[3]It also occurs to me that this means that Soundgarden, who released my all-time favorite album, and Local H, who released my second-favorite album, have now released albums on the same year twice. The first time was 1996 when Soundgarden put out Down on the Upside and Local H put out As Good As Dead. If I had to choose, I’d say that Local H put out the better album in 1996. Eh, who am I kidding? It’s not really a contest. Down on the Upside had some awesome songs, with “Burden in My Hand” being one of Soundgarden’s best, but the album as a whole was uneven and hard to love. Every time I listen to As Good As Dead, meanwhile, I find myself thinking that I have underrated the album and I need to stop doing that. So…yeah. It’s not even a contest, really.
[4]This thought started with “certainly one of the best of 2003” in my head. That caused me to realize that I remembered exactly zero albums from 2003, which required me to go find a list of albums of 2003. All I can say is ugh. Here are the non-Lovehammers albums from 2003 that I own/think I own/owned at one point:
Dave Matthews, Some Devil
Stone Temple Pilots, Thank You (greatest hits)
Pearl Jam, Lost Dogs (rarities compilation)
Barenaked Ladies, Everything to Everyone
Pat Green, Wave on Wave
Our Lady Peace, Live (live)
Blue October, History for Sale
The Mars Volta, De-Loused in the Comatorium
Local H, The No Fun EP (EP)
Live, Birds of Pray
Third Eye Blind, Out of the Vein
Evanescence, Fallen
The Ataris, So Long Astoria
The Postal Service, Give Up
That’s, um, that’s some list there. Take away things that aren’t albums and I think the No Fun EP and Lost Dogs are still probably the best of the lot. This was from that awkward time when I had stopped listening to mainstream country, hadn’t yet discovered Texas Country, and also hadn’t yet had my grunge renaissance, which happened in 2004. But to say that Murder on my Mind is the best of 2003 is damning with faint praise at best and, man, does that album deserve more, since the Dave Matthews, Pat Green, Blue October, Postal Service, BNL, Live, and Third Eye Blind all fit firmly in the, “I’m not embarrassed to own this, but wouldn’t go around advertising it or nothin’” category. Evanescence is not so much in that category. The Ataris put their amazing cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” on So Long, Astoria, and have never, to my knowledge, made another worthwhile song. I never actually bought a Mars Volta album, nor would I ever. I just wanted to see if you were awake.
Oh, and I used Wiki’s list of 2003 albums. There are maybe five albums on that list that I feel like I should re-visit. The lesson? 2003 was an awful year for music.
[5]Matchbox 20 has something to say about the radio. I love that song, for the record. I kinda-sorta dismissed Matchbox 20’s North as an album by Matchbox 20 and good in that Matchbox 20 way for people who like Matchbox 20, but it’s grown on me. It’s not going to be one of the all-time greats, but I still listen to the first three Matchbox 20 albums and I suspect I’ll be listening to North for a good, long time.
[6]Through this I learned that one of the Lovehammers’, then known as the Swinging Lovehammers, first gigs was at something called Sonfest. Sonfest was a Christian music festival out in the cornfields of rural Illinois that was headlined by Third Day and advertised on Q101. This juxtaposition amused me to no end and still amuses me. From the way the story was relayed on PledgeMusic it seems that the Lovehammers were exactly as amused as I was, especially since their main logistical problem was wrapped up in the question of how to get drunk at an Evangelical Christian music festival.
[7]That second part was more an accident of timing. Soundgarden had a fan presale and a regular sale in November. November was also a terribly busy month for me. So by the time I got around to the fanlist presale it was sold out and by the time I got around to the regular sale it was also out.
[8]Gladstone got that part exactly right. Chris Cornell has had the tremendous luck/privilege of recording albums with three of the greatest guitarists of the ‘90s: Kim Thayil, Mike McCready, and Tom Morello. But his bassist and drummer with Audioslave weren’t nearly as good as what he had with Soundgarden or Temple of the Dog. In fact, one of the things I noted years ago was that one of the big differences between Louder than Love and Badmotorfinger was the replacement of Hiro Yamamoto with Ben Shepherd. You don’t really notice Ben Shepherd on the three classic Soundgarden albums, but you notice that he’s most definitely not on Louder than Love. It’s kind of important.
[9]And the random Pearl Jam tag in the middle of this particular performance is perfect. Nirvana might be the popular notion of the Seattle grunge sound, but Soundgarden and Pearl Jam are the best Seattle grunge bands bar none. Both bands are inextricably linked.
[10]Also, and not for nothing, Marty Casey seems like a genuinely good guy. I’ve now talked to him on two separate occasions and he’s come across as the most down to earth lead singer I’ve met who isn’t James Dunning of the Lost Immigrants or Robert Hope of Senekah, both of whom have the obvious advantage in that category of literally being regular people to me. Robert once crashed on my couch, after all.
Either way, I had a ticket to the CD release show on December 1st. I’d decided to buy the VIP ticket because it came with free shit but had avoided the extra all-access VIP because free booze and access to (what I assumed at the time and was absolutely correct about) the balcony at Joe’s on Weed Street wasn’t all that enticing for me. My plan, instead, was to go to Joe’s, get the free shit, then go up and have dinner at the Goose Island brewpub on Clybourn, which is about two blocks from Joe’s.
This worked brilliantly. The Lovehammers were supposed to go on at about 10, so at somewhere in the neighborhood of 9:30 I was walking down Sheffield and I realized that the guy who was walking up Sheffield towards me looked a hell of a lot like Marty Casey. When we were about even with each other I realized that, yes, I was walking past Marty Casey, so I said, “Marty Casey?”
This is always a difficult point. I’m just some random fucker who recognizes a guy who’s semi-famous and he’s a guy who’s got better things to do than deal with some random fucker who’s on Sheffield and may or may not have just had a couple IPAs up at the Goose Island brewpub.
Either way, the guy who was most definitely Marty Casey turned around, stuck his hand out and said, “Hey, what’s your name?”
I shook his hand and said, “I’m Brian. I’m on my way to see your show.”
He said, “That’s cool. I’m trying to sneak in the back door.”
So then we went our separate ways, but I said, “Sorry, I usually try not to bug people,” in an apologetic tone.
“That’s cool,” he said, “We’re just two guys passing each other in an alley, you know?”
It’s weird. There are basically three rock demi-gods in my pantheon of rock demi-gods I’ve personally met: Roger Clyne, Scott Lucas, and Marty Casey. I’ve also met Mike Doughty, who’s totally awesome but, for whatever reason, doesn’t have the same level of, “Holy shit!” for me. Of the trinity, though, Roger Clyne is the most relatable from a distance. Scott Lucas is more of an aloof guy who just kind of knows he has to deal with his fans and that’s totally cool with me. He strikes me as an introvert who chose a very extroverted career. Marty Casey always seemed like the guy who is most likely to be a prima donna. He’s not, though. Of the three I’d honestly say that Marty Casey is the guy I’d be most likely to say hello to on the street. And I once had a conversation with Roger Clyne in a gas station outside of New Braunfels, Texas after seeing the Peacemakers five times in nine days and he remembered my name. Oh, and James Dunning of the Lost Immigrants created the greatest band t-shirt of all time. I wore it to a Peacemakers show before I left Texas. A couple months later I wore it to a RC/PH show at Schuba’s in Chicago and Roger remembered the t-shirt.
Even at that, I’m somehow less intimidated by the notion of saying hello to Marty Casey on the street.
It was interesting leaving these albums until November. By the time they hit I pretty much knew that the best albums of 2012 were going to be Local H’s Hallelujah! I’m a Bum and Sons of Bill’s Sirens in one order or another and I was pretty sure that Scott Lucas & the Married Men’s Blood Half Moon was going to be in the three spot.[2] If there were any two potential game changers, however, Soundgarden and the Lovehammers had to be atop the list.[3]
Soundgarden, for those keeping track, is fucking Soundgarden. They are, quite literally, the most important band in my personal history. Superunknown is my all-time best album and Badmotorfinger is one of the all-time greats as well. They’ve been not-Soundgarden for a long time, though, which was always a potential pitfall. Also, prior to the release of King Animal the only Soundgarden song we’d heard was “Live to Rise” off of The Avengers soundtrack. Somehow “Live to Rise” managed to come off as “You Know My Name,” which Chris Cornell did for the Casino Royale soundtrack plus the guys from Soundgarden but still somehow less awesome. This isn’t a knock against “You Know My Name” because that’s a great song. It’s basically that “Live to Rise” was nondescript. Soundgarden is not supposed to be nondescript. By the same token, though, I saw Soundgarden at the UIC Pavilion right after I moved back to Chicago last year and it was fucking awesome. They didn’t play a single song that’s been recorded since 1996 and went so deep that I had to listen to Ultramega OK on the way home to figure out what the fuck they’d played for a couple of the songs, which were “Mood for Trouble” and “Flower,” if I recall.
The Lovehammers are a little harder to parse. The self-titled album they put out the capitalize on Marty Casey’s post-Rock Star: INXS fame is awesome, but it’s more of a greatest hits album than a true studio album. 2003’s Murder on My Mind is at least a top 20 all-time album in my book, though.[4] L’Strange is obviously an indie album from a point just before it was possible to do that in a way that didn't immediately advertise itself. Heavy Crown is an album that I consider good but not great, but it’s hard to explain. There aren’t really any songs I don’t like and “Black Angel (Not Gonna Be the One)” is legitimately awesome, as are “Your Time, My Time” and the title track. But I’m meh on the album as a whole. I saw the Lovehammers at Hammerfest in February, and then at both shows they did at the Beat Kitchen in…um, the fall-ish. I’m pretty much at the point where the Lovehammers have eclipsed Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers as the band I’ve seen many, many times and would be totally excited to see live again tomorrow. Basically, the Lovehammers are my Chicago Saw Doctors. I love everything about them except their albums as actual albums. Still, as the Saw Doctors demonstrated two years ago with the increasingly excellent-in-my-humble-opinion The Further Adventures of the Saw Doctors, it can happen.
Let’s talk expectation for a moment. The music industry has changed drastically since Soundgarden was one of the biggest bands in the world. Radio was still the most important aspect of any band’s advertising.[5]
The radio built buzz. I think that’s one of the key components that’s missing in my weird footnote musings on how nothing in music feels big anymore. DJ’s used to make big announcements and unveil the new single after building it for an hour or three. Then you’d have to wait to hear it again. Being able to go to YouTube any old time and see the official video or that reasonably-high-quality bootleg someone shot at a show last week isn’t the same. It’s still possible, however, to create buzz.
Soundgarden, I’m sad to say, did a terrible job of creating buzz for King Animal. I’ve been on their mailing list because, y’know, duh. Every once in a while I got an email about King Animal that came off as a press release from the label. It reminded me that, yes, a new Soundgarden album was coming up one of these days. It didn’t exactly convince me to care, though. So when I signed up for the pre-order of King Animal it was almost an afterthought.
The Lovehammers did a brilliant job of creating buzz. They did the Kickstarter thing through PledgeMusic, which is basically the same thing as Kickstarter, but Kickstarter has become the Kleenex of fundraising campaigns. Back in the day I participated in the pre-Kickstarter pre-order fundraiser for Heavy Crown and it was fine. I sent the band 15 bucks or whatever and several months later I got an autographed copy of Heavy Crown in the mail. I’m also well aware of the Kickstarter model and its benefits and limitations.
The Lovehammers didn’t use PledgeMusic in the standard Kickstarter model. They were clear from the very beginning that the album was actually almost done and they didn’t really need the money for studio time and all that stuff. Their idea, instead, was to use PledgeMusic as a fan site. Anyone who went in would get whatever they’d pay for in the end, but in the process they’d get updates and random stories from the band. I signed up at the $25 level to get an mp3 download of the new album and a t-shirt and then every week or so I got an email with the latest update. Sometimes the update was a new song. Sometimes the update was a recording of a really old song. Sometimes the update was a story.[6] I recognize that the process was somewhat intentionally manipulative, but by the same token it came across as organic and genuine and it worked. I was already prone to care about the Lovehammers before and over the course of their PledgeMusic campaign I felt progressively more connected to them.
It should be noted that the end result of Soundgarden and the Lovehammers pre-album advertising was the same. I bought a copy of King Animal and I bought a copy of Set Fire. I also bought a VIP ticket to the Set Fire release show at Joe’s last Saturday and a secondary market ticket to the Soundgarden show at the Riviera Theatre in January.[7] In the 2012 calendar year, then, I’ve given the Lovehammers or organizations related to the Lovehammers somewhere in the neighborhood of $130 for four concert tickets and a PledgeMusic campaign. I’ve spent about the same amount on Soundgarden-related albums and concert tickets. As such, it’s a bit of a wash. And if we learned anything from the stupid bullshit about registered voters v. enthusiastic voters in 2012, in the end a vote’s a vote and a dollar’s a dollar.
Still, on a purely emotional level I feel better about the Lovehammers stuff than the Soundgarden stuff. That’s the sort of thing that matters to some people. I also genuinely enjoyed being a part of the Lovehammers’ campaign because I felt like I really got something out of it. That matters on a fundamental level. Admittedly it probably matters more for people who aren’t me and in a situation where I’m not comparing the re-formation of one of the biggest bands of the ‘90s to a relentlessly local Chicago band. But for an indie band trying to make it big using Kickstarter…I’d recommend using the Lovehammers’ strategy.
So…let’s talk about the music itself.
I find reviews of King Animal fascinating. Most that I see seem to flog a King Animal-as-combination-of-Superunknown-and-Badmotorfinger-and-how-amazing-is-it-that-Soundgarden-still-has-the-magic combo. I’ll just link to this Gladstone piece at Cracked as an example of the genre, since I’m way too fucking lazy to look up the other ones I saw. Reviews like that are fascinating because, well, because I just don’t fucking see it. I got about four songs into King Animal and my main thought was, “Why would anyone listen to this since Superunknown already exists?” I believe that I posted an insta-review of the album on Facebook that basically said as much. The stuff that didn’t remind me of Superunknown, meanwhile, reminded me of Down on the Upside.
None of this is bad, mind you. King Animal is not a bad album. It’s just…it’s pretty much exactly what I’d expect for the mid-level threshold of the first major album released by a legendary band that’s been broken up for a decade and a half. Kim Thayil is there in all his glory. Chris Cornell’s lyrics are snappy. Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron are significantly better behind Cornell than the dudes that weren’t Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine were.[8] It’s basically an album that belongs somewhere on the same level as Down On the Upside in the Soundgarden library.
Comparing anything to Superunknown or Badmotorfinger is difficult at best. Both albums possessed a relentless, driving quality that few albums I’ve seen since could manage to duplicate. King Animal and, for that matter, Down on the Upside, tried to duplicate that quality but just plain didn’t. That doesn’t mean that they were bad or failures. It just means that they were made by a band that simply couldn’t achieve the heights they’d managed to achieve with two of the greatest albums of the ‘90s. Just listen to this version of “Slaves & Bulldozers.” It may well be the definitive Soundgarden song in the way it just pounds relentlessly through your ears and into your soul. I say this as someone who considers Superunknown superior to Badmotorfinger, by the way. I say this as someone who considers “Like Suicide” to be Soundgarden’s best song. “Slaves & Bulldozers” is the most Soundgarden of all Soundgarden songs.[9] Nothing on King Animal is even remotely close to “Slaves & Bulldozers.”
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I like it when bands try new things. I’ve been known, in fact, to get tired of bands who just do the same thing over and over and over again. That’s why, in the end, I wasn’t a big fan of Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers’ Unida Cantina. It just felt like the same album they’d been recording for the past several years and I wanted to see new things. But with Soundgarden…well…King Animal is just an inferior version of the three quintessential Soundgarden albums. That’s all there is to it.
I have a policy in life. If I’m listening to an album and all I can think about is how much more I’d prefer to listen to another album, then the album I’m listening to is probably not that great. That’s, ultimately, where King Animal ends up for me. It’s better than Audioslave, but it has a long way to go to reach the heights of the great Soundgarden albums of yesteryear.
So that brings us to the all-important question in the formulation of this particular post: is the new Lovehammers better than the new Soundgarden? The answer is a resounding, “Hell, yes.”
I have exactly two problems with the new Lovehammers album. The first is that it’s too short: nine songs, a live cover of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” and two alternate versions of songs that appeared earlier. I would have instantly dismissed it were it not for the fact that I’d already decided to accept Scott Lucas & the Married Men’s Blood Half Moon. Also, I love the Lovehammers’ version of “Baba,” so there’s that. Even so, the entirety of Set Fire is only about 43 minutes long, which is super short by LP standards. I’m also not overly enamored with the title track.
Still and all, eight excellent original songs, an excellent cover of one of the greatest rock songs of all time, and some other genuinely good stuff is nothing to sneeze at. It hits the all-important threshold of being something I’d prefer to listen to over various alternatives. It also means that I expect to spend more time listening to Set Fire than King Animal in the years to come. That has to count for something.[10]
With all that said, though, neither Set Fire nor King Animal were game changing albums. Hallelujah! I’m a Bum and Sirens are just too goddamn good to be overcome. I’m totally okay with that and I think you should be, too. Because it means that, from what I can recall at this exact moment, two albums with some really good songs came out in 2012, four good albums came out in 2012, and two albums that will end up somewhere in my greatest of all time list came out in 2012. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
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[1]This is actually an interesting thing to me. Soundgarden’s King Animal hit the streets on the traditional Tuesday and did the pre-release mp3 thing on Monday. The Lovehammers sent their pre-orderers copies on a Thursday. Back in the day albums came out on Tuesday. If you paid attention to such things, in fact, there were certain days when certain things were released. Music and video games came out on Tuesdays, movies came out on Fridays, etc. This was a logistics thing: send the trucks out on Monday, the overnight (or closing) crew puts them on the shelf and then wait for the buzz if the product in question was important enough. That sort of thing is almost completely unnecessary for most things these days. Digital distribution has not necessary killed the release-date-buzz-time thing, but it has certainly put it in a stranglehold.
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about that. Nothing feels…big, for lack of a better word, anymore. However, that might just be me, as I simply don’t go to stores to get things that I can download now. There’s no point. But what that means, at least for the stuff I pre-order, is that I get an email that says, “Hey, your thing is here,” or, if I ordered the special autographed edition, I find it in the mailbox.
[2] We haven’t talked about Blood Half Moon and I kind of want to get around to doing that. My main problem is that it’s short. My main praise is that it’s amazing. It’s eight tracks, one of which is a nine-minute Johnny Cash cover. But those eight songs add up to more than 45 minutes of music, which is good enough for me to call it an LP.
[3]It also occurs to me that this means that Soundgarden, who released my all-time favorite album, and Local H, who released my second-favorite album, have now released albums on the same year twice. The first time was 1996 when Soundgarden put out Down on the Upside and Local H put out As Good As Dead. If I had to choose, I’d say that Local H put out the better album in 1996. Eh, who am I kidding? It’s not really a contest. Down on the Upside had some awesome songs, with “Burden in My Hand” being one of Soundgarden’s best, but the album as a whole was uneven and hard to love. Every time I listen to As Good As Dead, meanwhile, I find myself thinking that I have underrated the album and I need to stop doing that. So…yeah. It’s not even a contest, really.
[4]This thought started with “certainly one of the best of 2003” in my head. That caused me to realize that I remembered exactly zero albums from 2003, which required me to go find a list of albums of 2003. All I can say is ugh. Here are the non-Lovehammers albums from 2003 that I own/think I own/owned at one point:
Dave Matthews, Some Devil
Stone Temple Pilots, Thank You (greatest hits)
Pearl Jam, Lost Dogs (rarities compilation)
Barenaked Ladies, Everything to Everyone
Pat Green, Wave on Wave
Our Lady Peace, Live (live)
Blue October, History for Sale
The Mars Volta, De-Loused in the Comatorium
Local H, The No Fun EP (EP)
Live, Birds of Pray
Third Eye Blind, Out of the Vein
Evanescence, Fallen
The Ataris, So Long Astoria
The Postal Service, Give Up
That’s, um, that’s some list there. Take away things that aren’t albums and I think the No Fun EP and Lost Dogs are still probably the best of the lot. This was from that awkward time when I had stopped listening to mainstream country, hadn’t yet discovered Texas Country, and also hadn’t yet had my grunge renaissance, which happened in 2004. But to say that Murder on my Mind is the best of 2003 is damning with faint praise at best and, man, does that album deserve more, since the Dave Matthews, Pat Green, Blue October, Postal Service, BNL, Live, and Third Eye Blind all fit firmly in the, “I’m not embarrassed to own this, but wouldn’t go around advertising it or nothin’” category. Evanescence is not so much in that category. The Ataris put their amazing cover of Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” on So Long, Astoria, and have never, to my knowledge, made another worthwhile song. I never actually bought a Mars Volta album, nor would I ever. I just wanted to see if you were awake.
Oh, and I used Wiki’s list of 2003 albums. There are maybe five albums on that list that I feel like I should re-visit. The lesson? 2003 was an awful year for music.
[5]Matchbox 20 has something to say about the radio. I love that song, for the record. I kinda-sorta dismissed Matchbox 20’s North as an album by Matchbox 20 and good in that Matchbox 20 way for people who like Matchbox 20, but it’s grown on me. It’s not going to be one of the all-time greats, but I still listen to the first three Matchbox 20 albums and I suspect I’ll be listening to North for a good, long time.
[6]Through this I learned that one of the Lovehammers’, then known as the Swinging Lovehammers, first gigs was at something called Sonfest. Sonfest was a Christian music festival out in the cornfields of rural Illinois that was headlined by Third Day and advertised on Q101. This juxtaposition amused me to no end and still amuses me. From the way the story was relayed on PledgeMusic it seems that the Lovehammers were exactly as amused as I was, especially since their main logistical problem was wrapped up in the question of how to get drunk at an Evangelical Christian music festival.
[7]That second part was more an accident of timing. Soundgarden had a fan presale and a regular sale in November. November was also a terribly busy month for me. So by the time I got around to the fanlist presale it was sold out and by the time I got around to the regular sale it was also out.
[8]Gladstone got that part exactly right. Chris Cornell has had the tremendous luck/privilege of recording albums with three of the greatest guitarists of the ‘90s: Kim Thayil, Mike McCready, and Tom Morello. But his bassist and drummer with Audioslave weren’t nearly as good as what he had with Soundgarden or Temple of the Dog. In fact, one of the things I noted years ago was that one of the big differences between Louder than Love and Badmotorfinger was the replacement of Hiro Yamamoto with Ben Shepherd. You don’t really notice Ben Shepherd on the three classic Soundgarden albums, but you notice that he’s most definitely not on Louder than Love. It’s kind of important.
[9]And the random Pearl Jam tag in the middle of this particular performance is perfect. Nirvana might be the popular notion of the Seattle grunge sound, but Soundgarden and Pearl Jam are the best Seattle grunge bands bar none. Both bands are inextricably linked.
[10]Also, and not for nothing, Marty Casey seems like a genuinely good guy. I’ve now talked to him on two separate occasions and he’s come across as the most down to earth lead singer I’ve met who isn’t James Dunning of the Lost Immigrants or Robert Hope of Senekah, both of whom have the obvious advantage in that category of literally being regular people to me. Robert once crashed on my couch, after all.
Either way, I had a ticket to the CD release show on December 1st. I’d decided to buy the VIP ticket because it came with free shit but had avoided the extra all-access VIP because free booze and access to (what I assumed at the time and was absolutely correct about) the balcony at Joe’s on Weed Street wasn’t all that enticing for me. My plan, instead, was to go to Joe’s, get the free shit, then go up and have dinner at the Goose Island brewpub on Clybourn, which is about two blocks from Joe’s.
This worked brilliantly. The Lovehammers were supposed to go on at about 10, so at somewhere in the neighborhood of 9:30 I was walking down Sheffield and I realized that the guy who was walking up Sheffield towards me looked a hell of a lot like Marty Casey. When we were about even with each other I realized that, yes, I was walking past Marty Casey, so I said, “Marty Casey?”
This is always a difficult point. I’m just some random fucker who recognizes a guy who’s semi-famous and he’s a guy who’s got better things to do than deal with some random fucker who’s on Sheffield and may or may not have just had a couple IPAs up at the Goose Island brewpub.
Either way, the guy who was most definitely Marty Casey turned around, stuck his hand out and said, “Hey, what’s your name?”
I shook his hand and said, “I’m Brian. I’m on my way to see your show.”
He said, “That’s cool. I’m trying to sneak in the back door.”
So then we went our separate ways, but I said, “Sorry, I usually try not to bug people,” in an apologetic tone.
“That’s cool,” he said, “We’re just two guys passing each other in an alley, you know?”
It’s weird. There are basically three rock demi-gods in my pantheon of rock demi-gods I’ve personally met: Roger Clyne, Scott Lucas, and Marty Casey. I’ve also met Mike Doughty, who’s totally awesome but, for whatever reason, doesn’t have the same level of, “Holy shit!” for me. Of the trinity, though, Roger Clyne is the most relatable from a distance. Scott Lucas is more of an aloof guy who just kind of knows he has to deal with his fans and that’s totally cool with me. He strikes me as an introvert who chose a very extroverted career. Marty Casey always seemed like the guy who is most likely to be a prima donna. He’s not, though. Of the three I’d honestly say that Marty Casey is the guy I’d be most likely to say hello to on the street. And I once had a conversation with Roger Clyne in a gas station outside of New Braunfels, Texas after seeing the Peacemakers five times in nine days and he remembered my name. Oh, and James Dunning of the Lost Immigrants created the greatest band t-shirt of all time. I wore it to a Peacemakers show before I left Texas. A couple months later I wore it to a RC/PH show at Schuba’s in Chicago and Roger remembered the t-shirt.
Even at that, I’m somehow less intimidated by the notion of saying hello to Marty Casey on the street.
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