Chris Cornell's grunge glory fighting time
Time can be kind or cruel. In Chris Cornell's case, it's been both. On his latest solo album, "Scream," the onetime singer for grunge icons Soundgarden (and later, Audioslave) has a song titled "Time," a mid-tempo plodder that, during his performance of it Friday at the House of Blues, pointed painfully to the creative bloat the years can bring.
Bloat, at least of a physical nature, is not something one usually thinks of when considering Chris Cornell. At 44, sauntering on stage in jeans and form-fitting sweat shirt to the choppy guitars and chopped-up beats of the new "Part of Me," he looked like a bantam boxer primed for what proved to be a two-hour workout before a sold-out crowd. He's even grown his hair out again, letting it fly like a "Louder Than Love"-era flashback.
As Cornell amply demonstrated, he's still got that throat-shredding scream: eternally youthful and entirely intact, especially on golden grunge goodies like the roiling dark metal of Soundgarden's "Pretty Noose" and a strong, sinewy "Hunger Strike" (from his one-off Temple of the Dog project). The encore-closer, "Black Hole Sun," was bleakly beautiful, with Cornell thundering like Zeus over a churning maelstrom wrought by his four-piece backing band. No question about it - the titanium-strength voice was still there. If only the songs were.
Divvying up roughly two dozen numbers among the varied stages of his career made one thing glaringly obvious. Most of Cornell's post-Soundgarden output paled in jarring contrast to the grippingly downcast material written with his most famous band. And let's face it, when it comes to subtlety, he's always shared journeyman belter Sammy Hagar's sense of restraint and nuance. Therefore, bombastic by-the-numbers schlock like "You Know My Name," penned for the James Bond franchise, sounded as cartoonishly calculated as their premise.
Worse, the handful of the new songs from this year's grimacingly awful "Scream," a disc that disastrously pairs Cornell with hip-hop/dance producer Timbaland, came across as stilted, soulless, and devoid of any genuine inspiration.
The witless "Watch Out" was one of a half dozen or so newbies that sounded like a dreadful gene-splicing of Justin Timberlake and Chris Daughtry of "American Idol." A few more clunkers like these, and Cornell will no longer be one. 