The CD Odyssey rolls on, gentle reader, and I'm approaching 400 reviews. It is a bit weird to have gotten this far on this crazy project, and still have so far to go. I guess this is my sand mandala. Of course if I meant that, I'd delete all the entries when I finish. Unlikely, but since I'm not even halfway through, I won't judge what I'll do at the end.
Disc 393 is…Screaming Life/Fopp
Artist: Soundgarden
Year of Release: 1990, but the original EPs were released in 1987 and 1988
What’s Up With The Cover?: Chris Cornell, looking very young. This is what passed for heart-throb in 1990 as I recall.
How I Came To Know It: I was introduced to Soundgarden by my former room-mate Greg. This album I loved because of the remake of the Ohio Players' "Fopp" so it was an easy purchase after we were no longer living together.
How It Stacks Up: This is technically not an album, but a re-release of two EPs. That said, I'm going to rate it as an album anyway. I've got 5 Soundgarden albums. Of the five, I'd put this one third or fourth.
Rating: 3 stars
I imagine you could count yourself as pretty cool if you have these two EPs in their original format, instead of this later re-release. I could point out that the music would be the same as my version, but I think that would just be sour grapes that I don't have the cool originals.
How many songs constitute an EP? Four to six is about right and the two EPs here are at either end of that range.
"Screaming Life" is the earlier album, and has six tracks. I found the quality of these songs very uneven. The opening track, "Hunted Down" pretty awesome, with a swamp-crawling guitar riff accompanying Cornell's stellar rock vocals. This song wades through the fens in slow motion, but is over too soon at only 2:42 in total length.
The relatively poor production value on "Screaming Life" is a minor annoyance, but doesn't hurt the songs as badly as it could, because they tend to suit themselves to fuzzy sound. Still, I think I would prefer them with a bit better value. No doubt the boys were light in the pockets when these songs were recorded, but that doesn't change the final product twenty-two years later.
The album has heavy Sabbath influences, which you'd expect from a Seattle grunge band, but Soundgarden also incorporates other music influences like the funk guitar on "Little Joe" and punk arrangements on "Tears To Forget." "Tears To Forget's" mix of metal and punk reminded me a lot of mid-eighties Black Flag.
The second EP is the four-song record "Fopp." "Fopp" is a fun and sexy funk song originally written and performed by the Ohio Players. If you haven't heard the original, do yourself a favour and look it up, as it is damn fine.
Soundgarden puts a grunge twist on the song, making it thick and heavy in just the right amount. They don't overdo the heaviness which so many heavy bands do when they are remaking something out of genre. Soundgarden keeps enough humour and lightness that the original funk shines through.
The EP also features a remix of "Fopp" which is almost twice as long titled "Fopp (Dub)" on the CD. No, mercifully it is not dub-step. Instead, it is a strange mixture of the original Soundgarden version and some weird Herbie Hancock type jams. It reminded me of those extra remixes tacked onto the end of the Queen re-releases of the nineties, but better. When I looked it up to see who had written it, I was both surprised and not surprised to find Beck listed in the credits. Just another example of Beck's crazy genius. The remix is one of those tracks that might have you saying 'what the hell?' the first couple times you hear it, but it will quickly grow on you.
The other two tracks on the Fopp EP are "Kingdom of Come" and "Swallow My Pride" the titles of which were the source of much snickering among my friends when we were twenty. For all that they are good songs and not nearly as lurid as I remembered us thinking they were.
I'm not sure if it is my imagination, but the production values on the Fopp EP seem marginally better than those on "Screaming Life" but still aren't great. I'd love to see this album get an audio facelift, which would probably propel it into four stars, but I suspect the original masters aren't great either. So it goes.
In the end, this album is uneven in places, but for all that it has some great music, including one of the finest remakes I've ever heard in "Fopp."
Best tracks: Hunted Down, Little Joe, Hand of God, Swallow My Pride, Fopp.
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