Customer Reviews

Louder Than Love

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4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
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This has always been my favorite Soundgarden record. I am a fan of their later work (especially Superunknown and Badmotorfinger), but this record contains a rawness and vitality that their more polished later stuff lacks. Louder Than Love straddles the two major periods in Soundgarden's career: their earlier, less-metal sounding work (e.g. Ultramega OK and Screaming Life/Fop) and their later more-metal sounding work, epitomized by the aforementioned Superunknown and Badmotorfinger. Louder Than Love contains the elements of both of these periods.

This music is raw and angry, and the lyrics are more biting. It's closer to a punk rock record. Very much in the spirit of many other SST bands (SST is the label that Soundgarden was on prior to this Louder Than Love, which is their first record for a major label). You won't find any "Black Hole Sun" type songs on here.

There are so many good songs on this record. "Ugly Truth" has to be my favorite. "Big Dumb Sex" is also a favorite. It's an awesome indictment of all of those terrible 80's sexual inuendo glam-metal songs (such as Warrant's "Cherry Pie").

If you have not been exposed to Soundgarden's earlier work, then this is the place to start. Ultramega OK and Screaming Life/Fop are even more raw and punk than this, which makes Louder Than Love a great transition for the unitiated. The first thing that many late-Soundgarden fans have to get used to is that Cornell's voice is less developed and polished here. Any Soundgarden fan, however, should own this record. As I said, in my book it's their best.

This album changed my life. I hated most all heavy music that came out after _Master of Puppets_ . . . until this. And then it was grunge grunge grunge. I thought the grunge thing was a clever way for marketers to call Soundgarden something other than metal, as this stuff is about as metal as you could ever get. Lots of hair, bludgeoning riffs, high high screamy voice, guitar shredding: everything except the hairspray, spandex, and songs about scoring chicks (notable exception: "Big Dumb Sex," the perfect parody of the hair scene--"Know what to do,/ I'm gonna f**k, f**k, f**k, f**k you). Not to say it doesn't do things that metal had never done, 'coz it does, assuring it its rightful place in the metal pantheon.

First off, Chris Cornell's lyrics are not your typical hormonal metal chants. Some of these are diatribes. "Hands All Over" rains down hard on globalization, using abstraction to get his point across in an intellectual way: "Hands all over the coastal waters./ The crewmen thank her,/ then lay down their oily blanket." Light years beyond AC/DC. The immediate parallel is of course Zeppelin. And of course Soundgarden owes them a huge debt (what rock band after them doesn't?). What I find differentiates Soundgarden from Zep more than anything is Thayil's guitar. Listen close and at times his guitar sounds positively Farsi or raga, not always in the controlled way you hear white bands play when they are trying to be "world," but in a way that sounds like him taking his Iranian upbringing and putting it through a filter of rage. I also love his use of harmonics. Few guitarists are as good at making the instrument sound as scary as an exorcism. And of course, he shreds with the best of them, taking the excursions into more post-tonal territory than his harmony-obsessed counterparts doing their time in bands like Poison and Winger. You don't have to think hard to know that he is one of my favorite rock guitarists ever.

_Louder than Love_ stands alongside of their albums near the pinnacle. It's a different beast than any of their others, a transition from the more loose (and also excellent) _Ultramega OK_ to the tighter _Badmotorfinger_. I like the tension and the dynamics on this one. It's the more hippy Soundgarden. I sometimes wonder if I like this a little more than their later stuff because Hiro Yamamoto is still on the bass here. I just wonder if he brought a slightly more sludgy feel to the band than Ben Shepherd, nonetheless a fine rock bassist. Whatever it is, _Louder Than Love_ will be remembered as a monument to the late eighties, the molten metal that singed the life out of the plastic metal out there and really put the bad stuff out of commission for good, never to dominate the charts again. It's a monument that says, "metal shouldn't be commercial, it should scream 'can't escape the louder pull--LOUD LOVE! LOUD LOVE! LOU-OUD LO-OO-A-OV," magmatic riffs and feedback careening with hyperkinetic drums all the while.

I picked up this album and Ultramega OK on the same day at a used CD shop in my hometown years ago. While Ultramega hit me first, this album is just as good, and a little more consistent. The original, scrapped title fits this album a bit better in my personal opinion because indeed this album is HEAVY.

Actually, it's the band's most unapologetically heavy disc, with Badmotorfinger a close second (I think that the production on Badmotorfinger helps it sound as heavy as it does). The production on this album is a bit murky, but it completely adds to it's charm as far as I'm concerned. When you hear the double guitars come crashing in at the beginning of "Ugly Truth" you know the 80's are pretty much over forever.

Soundgarden is one of my all-time favourite bands, and their pre-1990's era is their best in my own estimation. As good as the last 3 albums are, their first 3 (if you count Screaming Life/Fopp as one) are the iconoclast of big, loud rock with HUGE balls. Early Cornell and Mike Patton constantly jockey for position in my mind as the top rock vocalist of all time and there's no clear winner. In fact Soundgarden toured with Faith No More on this album... and I can't even begin to imagine how awesome that would have been.

These guys had actually been signed to a major for a couple of years before this album hit, but chose to release earlier material on indie labels, probably to build a local/indie following. Regardless this album came out at a time when the industry needed a fresh start and Soundgarden delivers. A little too metal for the punks and a little too punk for the metal-heads, it wasn't a huge seller but classic riffs abound on this pile of sludge. In fact, "Loud Love" is based on one of the best rock riffs ever! There's a reason why Audioslave performs it on the bonus CD that comes with their latest DVD. You might recognize that one or "Hands All Over" but my personal favourite has to be "I Awake". That song plus "Beyond the Wheel" from Ultramega are 2 of the heaviest of all time, and absolutely stomp Led Zeppelin (who I love) for sheer power.

I think that one of the things I like best about this album is that it sounds like they came straight out of the garage. I'm not talking about sappy "new wave of the first wave of garage rock" like the trash that's passed off as garage nowadays (see the Strokes etc.), but rather that same aesthetic that you hear when listening to Nirvana's Bleach or early Melvins or even the first Zeppelin album (to an extent). Sounds like they just cranked the amps to maximum volume and played for their own deafening amusement when they wrote these tunes.

I must mention: If you already like this album, make SURE you get the video companion "Louder than Live". It's VHS and only 25 minutes of live footage but it is the most essential live concert I've ever seen, no hyperbole and no contenders. Sadly it's way too short and bootleggers know that the set continued on well past the end of the video... but that's another review. GET THAT VIDEO! Enough demand and maybe they'll re-release it on DVD with additional footage if such exists.

So if you're like me and love Soundgarden, but Superunknown and Down on the Upside don't do much for you, just buy this disc as soon as you can. For me it was the start of my re-discovery of grunge music... the latest truly great movement in rock music.

While just graduating from high school I was looking for something different musically and Soundgarden was what I found and they turned me on to tons of other bands. The Seattle big "grunge" movement was happening with bands like Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, and the Meat Puppets, changing the course of music for good, away from the typical and boring metal bands.

This album is in the same vein as their previous release of two E.P.'s combined: Screaming Life" & "Fopp. It had a raw, garage sound that I loved. They got compared to the great Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, which I can hear the influence of, but Soundgarden make a more modern version adding their own "grunge" style.

My favorite songs on this album are "Hands All Over", "Loud Love" and "Ugly Truth" which all display Chris Cornell's screeching and intense vocals over Kim Thayil's experimental, yet bold guitar riffs. I also liked the funny, yet in a more punk-ish style of "Full On Kevin's Mom" showing humor and irony.

If you like heavy, smooth, melodic guitar and bass, then this album is for you. I've always liked this album. It is very non-commercial for a major release. This album has a mood to it that is dark and somewhat psychedelic. The songs take their time tempo wise, but they are still hard and heavy. My favorites are "No Wrong, No Right", "I Awake" and "uncovered". They are probably the darkest and most moody. Soundgarden pretty much abandoned this sound when they reached commericial success. This album is a very unique work more along the lines of Kyuss, Melvins and Sabbath then any of their work that came after. A must have.

Although Louder Than Love is technically not as great an album as Badmotorfinger or Superunknown (mainly due to the differences in prodution), it is nonetheless my favorite Soundgarden album to listen to.
Surprisingly, the murkiness of the production doesn't detract from the band's overall sound. Rather, it adds a raw, swirling feel to the songs, a component that is more absent in their later work. Hiro Yamamoto and Matt Cameron produce a threatening rhythym section that rages head on with Kim Thayil's insidious guitar lines and Chris Cornell's screams. The sound is equal parts Black Sabbath and Led Zepplin, with some further influence provided by the band's fellow Seattlites, The Melvins.
There are more than a few staple Soundgarden songs on this album. They include: Gun, Full On Kevin's Mom, Loud Love, Big Dumb Sex, and my personal favorite, Hand All Over. Many listeners and critics ignore this period in their career in favor of their later work, mainly because they had not yet achieved mainstream success. This is not a good idea because the sound of their early recordings is just as rewarding (albeit a bit different) as the sound of their later ones.

This is a classic must have CD. They really need to release a remastered version like every other band is doing now with their older releases.

Probably not a sentiment shared by many, and I won't go into an excrutiating critique, but in my mind this is their best album. Songs like "Hands All Over," "Ugly Truth," "Uncovered," "Loud Love," and "Heretic (which did not appear on the album)" represent the band at their finest. Don't get me wrong, their subsequent albums were superb as well (even the relatively benign "Down On The Upside..."), but Chris' air raid siren vocals, Hiro's foundation crushing bass, and Kim's wailing guitar placed this as one of the best metal albums of all time.

Although Nirvana's music a couple of years later would be identified as the archetype of the grunge phenomenon, this album might better describe where grunge came from. Nirvana's music shared more of a pop sensibility with unyielding guitar noise, or as Ozzy Osbourne put it, "The Beatles meets the Sex Pistols".

However, Soundgarden, especially with this early effort, show that a pop hook was not on their minds. You almost feel you need to take a bath after listening to this 50-minute deflowering. The music on this album, among others, also demonstrates how the music itself derived not so much from metal, but rather from punk and post-punk music. The beat was simply turned around -- the guitar licks that were accompanied by a go-go beat were instead put behind a beat half the speed, and a whole new groove -- a dirtier groove -- was created.

The lyrics match the song styling. From "Ugly Truth", to "Get on the Snake", to "No Wrong, No Right", and finally to "Big Dumb Sex", the theme of the lyrics and music seem to be a parody/irony of the sexuality of the 70's and 80's arena metal heyday. By stripping the lyrics of their subtlety, they become all the more ironic.

Maybe more than the later albums, this one maintains a consistent musical and lyrical theme. That's not to say that there are better singles on "Badmotorfinger" and "Superunknown", but as an album as a whole, this one is a treat to listen through from start to finish.

In my opinion, this is Soundgarden's best album, although it may not be the most diverse or complex. It has pure, raw emotion with a heavy edge that was missing on later albums (although the later albums were also great).