Album Review: Soundgarden- Superunknown (20th Anniversary Reissue)

For some reason, when I was 11, I was not allowed to buy a copy of Superunknown by Soundgarden.

It was the summer of 1994 (a year I’ve written about somewhat extensively) and “Black Hole Sun” was, like, everywhere—specifically MTV, where I would stop what I was doing, and watch the video, transfixed at the then “cutting edge” special effects.

I was all set to plunk down my hard earned allowance money on a copy of the CD, but a few days prior, my mother informed me I was not allowed to buy this album.

Since this was, you know, twenty years ago, I can’t remember her reasoning behind this, and I’m sure if I were to ask her now, she wouldn’t even recall this exchange. Perhaps she was informed by someone she worked with that it was not an appropriate album for an 11 year old to be purchasing, or perhaps she thought the song “Spoonman” was really about heroin (it’s not.)

Anyway, after probably being upset about this decision for roughly five minutes, I got over it, and my life has, for the most part, gone on just fine because of this. Because let’s face it, I doubt that I would have hung on to my copy of Superunkown for the last twenty years. Two years after this, I bought the band’s (then) final album, Down on The Up Side, and then the following year, after their unceremonious breakup, the A-Sides singles compilation. Both of those ended up in a stack taken in to a used CD place a long, long time ago, traded for cash long spent on something else that was certainly very, very important.

The reason that I am revisiting the Knights of the Sound Table, and their seminal release, is because it’s celebrating that big milestone this year, and because nostalgia, the band has spared no expense in putting together a reissue of Superunknown, the album that is responsible for plucking them from Seattle grunge obscurity, into “Modern Rock” superstars.

Depending on how dedicated to the game you are, there is actually a variety of reissues to choose from—the most extravagant stretching out over four CDs, including the original album (remastered, obviously), as well as b-sides, live tracks, and demos of the songs you’ve come to know and love.

Maybe it’s because I listened to Soundgarden so casually, and when I was younger, I was less into the whole album, and more into the singles/songs I knew, but I always equate them as being a “singles band”—meaning that they have some really strong material, but then the rest of the album is just kind of there. It’s not bad, but it’s also not necessarily great either. Superunknown boasts the arguably the band’s two biggest, most well-known tunes—“Spoonman,” and “Black Hole Sun,” as well as the downcast “Fell on Black Days,” and the satirical “The Day I Tried to Live.”

I can’t say that this album has, like, aged poorly or gracefully, since this is literally the first time I’ve heard it, in its entirety. So I also can’t really comment on if the remastering job has made this sound exponentially better than it did twenty years ago. Or, if like most remasters, things are just louder. And while their 1991 effort, Badmotorfinger sounds incredibly dated by today’s standards, Superunknown is one of those albums that strikes a balance between sounding like an artifact while somehow maintaining relevancy—is it a total product of the time? Well yes, of course it is. But is it also timeless enough to sound like it could be made today? Yeah, somehow it does—you can hear echoes of it in any “Modern Rock” record released today with huge, expensive sounding production values—think Foo Fighters, Queens of The Stone Age, etc.

For the longtime, hardcore Soundgarden fan, a four disc set loaded with various demos and rehearsal takes of Superunknown may sound amazing, and like a wise use of your resources. To a casual listener—much of this I can stand to do without. Like how many different versions of “Fell on Black Days” do I need? At least five, you say? And how many piss-take non-album tracks are warranted? Another five? Oh ok. If you say so.

But that’s the issue with these expansive reissues that are often weighed down by ephemera.

One thing that is of some interest are the demo recordings of many of Superunknown’s tracks—the fidelity is slightly degraded during some of the heavier moments due to the tape it was committed to, but even more of a fascinating artifact than the album itself are these primitive incarnations of the songs, and then to see how polished and tight they became during the course of recording the record.

Listening to Superunknown twenty years later isn’t going to suddenly turn me into some kind of Soundgarden superfan, though it is making me incredibly nostalgic for the mid-90s. But then again, I think for most people in my age demographic, nostalgia for that time period is already at an all-time high. It has been worthwhile to hear this record from start to finish, and aside from revisiting my appreciation for some of the singles, it did confirm that while catchy, “Spoonman” is kind of not that great of a song, and lyrically sometimes it’s insipid, and finally, that a non-single like the gloomy, heavy duty “Fourth of July” rocks pretty hard.

The Superunknown reissue is out now via Universal.