The Wildhearts – Earth vs. The Wildhearts (1993)


I always thought this came out in 1994, but that must apparently have been the reissue. The Wildies’ debut is inarguably the most esteemed of their records by the rock media and the readers of the rock media, as evinced here (below The Darkness? Don’t make me laugh. Or cry) and hyurr. I’m not so sure, to be honest. Actually, I am sure that it isn’t their best album, but what can you do. This is the same rock press that thought P.H.U.Q. was some kind of massive disappointment, something I get even less.

Anyway, this album is pretty damn good, even if it’s not their best, and the reissue with ‘Caffeine Bomb’ is by definition superior. If nothing else, though, it is a fascinating document of where ‘Britrock’ stood before the explosion of Britpop sent our rock landscape back about twenty years. See, while grunge was still massive in America (Soundgarden between Badmotorfinger and Superunknown, Pearl Jam on their second album, Cobain still alive), Britain was in a strange limbo in terms of rock music.

I don’t want to sound too much like John Harris here, primarily because I hate his writing (and his stupid hair), but dance music was all the rage over here (and that’s great, because it was Ardkore.mania, and that’s my favourite kind of dance), and rock was living in this post-eighties (so that means Def Leppard, Little Angels and Thunder selling well) no-mans land where new stuff wasn’t really happening. Even indie seemed to be eating its own tail, as the shadow cast on its cardigan wearing world by the magnificent My Bloody Valentine had plunged it all into an eternal night of the living wannabes. So something had to be done.

Fortunately, the above situation meant the next generation of rock (and I mean the legitimate next generation, not the Oasis/Cast/Shed Seven lot, because retro pub rock can’t fairly be described as the ‘next’ anything) was going to be an interesting melting pot of different eras and aesthetics of rock. While I am probably going to devote a bit of time to the likes of Therapy? or maybe even Manic Street Preachers in the future, I reckon the Wildies were the most interesting band of the time anyway.

See, they formed in 1989, and you can tell there is a very glammy side to them. While their MySpace mentions Kix as an influence, and they went on to cover a Dogs D’Amour song, the band was more influenced by the punkier side of things, in Guns N’ Roses. In fact, they were – and still are – influenced by punk rock itself in a major way. And, because the best thing involving guitars in the UK at this time was metal, they were also essentially a metal band, influenced by Metallica and sharing stages with Pantera in the early days. So, while their sound wasn’t that refined on this record, the ideas were there, it was a new sound and, most importantly, it’s a cracking set of songs.

‘Greetings from Shitsville’ is about as good an opening gambit as you could hope for. Introduced by a bouncy metal riff whose head stays bobbing on the surface for the duration of the song, there is a really anthemic chorus and punk energy all the way through. Ginger apparently never thought he was a particularly good singer, but I can’t imagine anyone else singing these songs, as he has a great melodic delivery that’s tempered by a growly hoarseness that really fits the riffs.

‘TV’ Tan might be the best song on here, and if it’s not, then it’s just a complete gem of a rock song anyway. More punky and energetic than the first song, the metal is toned down in favour of the pop, as the lyric describes the life of a slacker. The football chant chorus is awesome (3 Colours red would later seem to base their short-lived career on this), as is the breakdown/build-up sequence. I want to live in the parallel universe where this has the public awareness of a ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.

The pseudo-ballad intro of ‘Everlone’ gives way to a riff that reminds me of Poison’s ‘Let it Play’ which, coming from me, is a big old compliment. As listeners to The Wildhearts would get used to, the chorus is massive. I can’t believe I didn’t recognise this when I saw them; gutted. It’s not quite as good as the later Foo Fighters song of similar title but, as that’s in the running for best-four-minute-rock-song-ever, that’s no big diss. An acoustic breakdown to end the song gives listeners an indication as to the bands musical future, especially as it proggily takes a left turn into a completely new riff. Okay, it’s not that proggy, but it’s hardly what was expected of pop-rock bands of the time.

‘Shame on Me’ and ‘Loveshit’ are more of what we have become accustomed to from this album, between which owners of the reissue get ‘hit’ single ‘Caffeine Bomb’, whose success led to the reissue in the first place. Think of it as their ‘Paranoid’ (which Sabbath apparently weren’t going to include on the album. It was going to be called War Pigs, smart guy), just five times faster. Like I said in the gig review, this has to be the fastest thing they ever did, from start to finish, and it is also the song responsible for bringing the band to my fourteen-year-old attention. I don’t know if this is a testament to the song or indictment of current chart music (probably a bit of both) but, if the Kaiser Chiefs or even Arctic Monkeys released this under a different name, everybody would go crazy.

I’m scared of stepping off a cliff into a sea of inescapable hyperbole at this point. I’m scared ‘Miles Away Girl’ will send me plunging to uncritical depths, so just blooming listen to it.

Glowing evidence of just how stacked this album is comes with the second-side one-two punch of ‘My Baby is a Headfuck’ and ‘Suckerpunch’, songs so fast and furious that I wouldn’t be surprised if they kicked off the album as a whole.

The latter is especially good, as I went for years between first and next listen, and the line ‘she got me with a- sucker! Sucker! Oh you fucker’ stayed with me for the duration. Melody is largely dropped in favour of a jerky, aggressive rhythm for most of the song, but after the aforementioned and infamous line, we get the bouncy riff to end all bouncy riffs (at least until Strapping Young Lad’s ‘Detox’ a few years later), a riff to which I went bananas when I saw them. That’s not to say the former doesn’t have its own moments, as it transforms for a few seconds into ‘Day Tripper’ before the real song comes back in with ‘ba-ba-ooh’ backing vocals. The guitar solo (performed by no less a legend than Mick Ronson) and piano plonking are the icing on a completely insane cake.

Obviously the last three songs fail to maintain this standard, but they are endearing enough blasts of pop rock to round out the album. If I seem overly enthusiastic about the album, it’s because I have been focusing on the best songs. Just over half of this album is absolute gold, and the remaining five or six songs are pretty good. So while it’s not the classic that others would have you believe it’s a fine start that also blows away the competition. Seriously, this was two years before the first Supergrass album…

The throughsilver Singles Premiership 2007!

I had an on-off running top singles list at a message board last year, and I decided I might as well give the Premiership its own page this year. I have been slowly (very slowly) writing about the singles that I like – and only the sigles I like; I’m not trying to document everything that gets released – and I decided that once I get to a twenty, I can ‘go live’ with it, as it were. I like this style of ranking, probably more than the end of year deal, because it gives anyone interested a look at how the list evolves over time. Not that anyone other than me is that interested, but it’s there anyway. What is really fun about this method is that, now we are up to the full complement of twenty, any more contenders will shove the existing number twenty into relegation. Oo er!

So there you have it. I’ll permalink it on the sidebar and anyone thinking I’m missing out on any good singles should feel free to let me know; input is appreciated.

P.S. I am aware my title graphic has vanished; I’m trying to get it sorted now.

P.P.S. Sorted!

Chris Cornell – Carry On Initial Thoughts

This is not what you could really accuse of being a great album. What’s really sad is that I wasn’t expecting it to be particularly good either. A bit of history then:

I love Soundgarden. They really are one of my favourite bands of the decade that was the nineteen-nineties. Not only were they consistently great, but Cornell was a marvellous front-man. He was the best looking man in rock back in 1991 (at least I’m pretty sure he was – better looking than Vedder, Cobain and Patton at any rate), and he was oddly humble the whole time. I remember reading in Metal Hammer in 1996 his answer to ‘what would you do if Pamela Anderson propositioned you’; it was something to do with lawsuits and being happily married.

Anyway, the music. I have liked Soundgarden since I was about eleven years of age, and Cornell had this strange knack of improving with every release: Badmotorfinger was better than what had come before; Temple of the Dog better than that; Superunknown better still; Down on the Upside was the best Soundgarden release of them all, and don’t let anyone tell you different; his first solo album proper, Euphoria Morning, managed to improve even on that. Not only was there a steady increase in quality, but the style changed with it.

Soundgarden, like that first generation of grunge bands, liked to make noise in a fuzzed-out-Sabbath style. Of course, that generation can be pretty easily summed up by looking at the track-listing of the seminal Deep Six compilation from the mid-eighties. Their peers were the likes of Melvins, Green River, Malfunkshun and I’d argue even St. Vitus. Wino from the latter band wrote that he’d been ‘born too late’ what with the thrash metal being cool at that time, but he was definitely not alone in the Sabbath worship. Even the first Nirvana album is in thrall to this style of rock.

By the start of the nineties, what was once grunge (but I would argue no more, in the strict sense) was making it big. Former glam rock band Alice In Chains were building up steam, as were Pearl Jam, another band whose roots lay in glam (Mother Love Bone represent). Luckily, proper grunge bands were also making headway, in the form of Nirvana and Soundgarden (you also had Screaming Trees and Afghan Whigs, but neither band was ever really grunge).

So, with metal still just about being the toast of the rock town (Metallica and Megadeth releasing their biggest albums, Queensrÿche still being pretty damn massive), Soundgarden effectively incorporated metal riffing into the mix, complementing Cornell’s Plant-goes-hardcore vocals perfectly. Superunknown tempered the speed freakery with a fuller, bassier, mix and Down on the Upside was just insanely varied for the time.

With a lot of Soundgarden’s best songs being of the ballad variety (‘Room a Thousand Years Wide’, ‘The Day I Tried to Live’, Fell on Black Days’, ‘Zero Chance’), and written solely by Cornell, it stood to reason that the first album released under his name would be stripped of the riffery. Prior to its release in 1999, he said it would be a ‘singer’s record’, and it was clearly going to be influenced by his late friend Jeff Buckley. It was a beautiful piece of work, the delicately layered arrangements working perfectly as a backing to his pained, wonderfully recorded vocal.

I made the mistake of missing his date that year at Manchester Academy, and he ended up in a band with the former Rage Against The Machine instrumentalists, initially called Civilian, but later officially dubbed Audioslave. Here is where the disappointment began as, a few choice riffs and the gorgeous ‘Like a Stone’ aside, Cornell had released his first mediocre album. It certainly wasn’t bad, but the sheer fact it wasn’t that good was alarming enough.

Audioslave released two more albums – that I didn’t even hear – and split up after enjoying a deserved amount of commercial success (hey, I’m not going to grudge the quartet some dollars after the entertainment they have given me in the big picture). Cornell resurfaced with ‘You Know My Name’, a suitably camp Bond theme and again it wasn’t bad; wasn’t great.

Alarm bells sounded first when it turned out the latter song was going to be on his debut album (a camp fun single is one thing, but it might besmirch an otherwise serious ‘artist album’), and then when news broke that he was covering ‘Billie Jean’. To make matters worse, I heard a new song in HMV and was unmoved.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I downloaded Carry On, his new album, and we are now up to speed. I was definitely expecting something very Adult Orientated Rock in its sound, a tad bland perhaps, and my expectations proved right. Part of me would like to write it off as a bad album so I don’t have to bother with it anymore (and spare myself more potential heartache as I consider what could have been), but there are glimpses of the old Cornell to bring me back into the mix, batting my wings against the window pane like a moth catching sight of a lamp on a cold winter night.

Opener ‘No Such Thing’ offered both that relief of blandness (yay, I don’t have to bother any more!) and the empty feeling in ones gut that comes with a long-time favourite failing to bring the goods. It was no ‘Let me Drown’ as far as album starters go, that’s for sure. But then, something about ‘Poison Eye’ heartened me a tad. It wasn’t like he’d started massively rocking out or anything (that reminds me: ‘No Such Thing’ had a decent bit of guitar about it), but that was the point.

It seems that it is when Cornell tries to rock out these days that he makes the biggest missteps. It was true of ‘Mission’, by far the weakest song on Euphoria Morning and pretty much of Audioslave as a whole. What so filled me with chagrin was that, after an excellent album largely composed of ballads that suited his ageing voice, his attempts to rock were just awkward and unnecessary. So ‘Poison Eye’ was a small triumph in that it had his one-time trademark wicked little vocal melodies and that tightrope walk of self-deprecation and misanthropy (previously seen on the likes of ‘Burden in my Hand’ and ‘Follow My Way’).

For the most part, though, this is MOR (though let’s not get carried away, it’s no worse than The Killers or recent Flaming Lips): songs like ‘Disappearing Act’, ‘Ghosts’ and Finally Forever’ are neither here nor there. What’s worse is that, a couple of hours removed from my initial listen, I can’t even remember a lot of the tracks.

It is in the unlikeliest places that this album succeeds. I was terrified of hearing his take on ‘Billie Jean’, especially when his own songs sounded so bland, but this stripped down, slo-mo performance actually works. I was rather dreading the high notes of ‘the kid is not my son’, but Cornell carried it of with aplomb. Similar was the odd ‘She’ll Never Be Your Man’.

Being a positive person, I won’t accuse the song of being anti-gay women (definitely one reading, as Cornell mentions all the roles the titular woman can fill, but ‘she’ll never be your man’. Hmm), so we are left with a bizarrely good Cornell-goes-Prince workout. Luckily, Chris doesn’t try to out-sex the tiny genius, but there is a definite reminder of ‘I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man’ or ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’.

We get some lyrically ‘nasty Cornell’ on the likes of ‘Poison Eye’ and ‘Killing Birds’, and the vocals range from good to occasionally great. I just wish he’d go back to writing songs that suit his voice. While it would definitely be great if he would go back to working with Eleven, or sonically stripped further down, I suppose the lure of the FM rock dollar is too great. Perhaps most worryingly, the familiarity presented by ‘You Know My Name’ was actually a massive positive, which rather sums up this album: on its own it’s OK. As a follow-up to Euphoria Morning it’s a disaster. The small mercy here is that it is just good enough not to turn me off the man. Which is pretty sad, all things considered.

Download: ‘No Such Thing’
Download: ‘Poison Eye’