Bidding for a popular breakthrough with their second major-label album,
Soundgarden suddenly developed a sense of craft, with the result that
Badmotorfinger became far and away their most fully realized album to that point. Pretty much everything about
Badmotorfinger is a step up from its predecessors -- the production is sharper and the music more ambitious, while the songwriting takes a quantum leap in focus and consistency. In so doing, the band abolish the murky meandering that had often plagued them in the past, turning in a lean, muscular set that signaled their arrival in rock's big leagues. Conventional wisdom has it that despite platinum sales,
Badmotorfinger got lost amid the blockbuster success of
Nevermind and
Ten (all were released around the same time). But the fact is that, though they're all great records,
Badmotorfinger is much less accessible by comparison. Not that it isn't melodic, but it also sounds twisted and gnarled, full of dissonant riffing, impossible time signatures, howling textural solos, and weird, droning tonalities. It's surprisingly cerebral and arty music for a band courting mainstream metal audiences, but it attacks with scientific precision. Part of that is due to the presence of new bassist
Ben Shepherd, who gives the band its thickest rhythmic foundation yet -- and, moreover, immediately shoulders the departed
Hiro Yamamoto's share of songwriting duties. But it's apparent that the whole band has greatly expanded the scope of its ambitions. And
Badmotorfinger fulfills them, pulling all the different threads of the band's sound together into a mature, confident, well-written record. This is heavy, challenging hard rock full of intellectual sensibility and complex band interplay. And with their next album,
Soundgarden would learn how to make it fully accessible to mainstream audiences as well. [The 2016 reissue of
Soundgarden's breakthrough
Badmotorfinger arrives in two separate formats: a double-CD set that contains a disc of outtakes and live performances, and a seven-disc box that simply offers more of the same. The second disc on the double-CD is effectively a sampler of the big box, containing a few of the rough run-throughs of the album's songs, plus excerpts from the March 6, 1992 show at Seattle's Paramount Theatre. Neither edition contains the SOMMS EP, which was a limited-edition bonus to 1992 pressings of the album commemorating
Soundgarden's appearance at Lollapalooza, and its absence is puzzling because it's not only one of the band's rarer releases, it's better than much of what's heard here. Apart from "New Damage," which features
Queen's
Brian May on guitar, all the studio outtakes are unproduced early takes on the album, which are interesting but not as powerful as the finished record. The live material is better, capturing the band's aggression and muscle, and having the complete show on the Super Deluxe set -- both on CD and DVD -- is nice, but it's hard not to think that the 25-minute EP could've been thrown onto the set somewhere, even if it was just on the Blu-Ray.] ~ Steve Huey
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