Badmotorfinger

Lately I've been revisiting seminal metal albums from my adolescence in order to see how they hold up to the weight of an almost twenty-year lapse in my dedicated listening. This is more than a mere exercise in nostalgia since I am actually interested in dissecting these records from a more objective standpoint. There have been many twists and turns along the way. Some albums have held weight while others have crashed and burned. But if there's one record that I've been skirting, Badmotorfinger is it. This record was super-important to me back when it was released and I fell deeply in-and-out of love with it as the 90's progressed. But here we are almost twenty-one years later, which means I was 13 when this came out -- a total newbie whose heavy metal cassette collection totaled a mere seven albums, all of which had been released in the 70's & 80's and directed to me through my cousin. But I didn't buy this one on cassette. And it wasn't my cousin's recommendation either. Badmotorfinger was to be my first-ever, self-selected CD purchase and an album that opened the door to contemporary heavy music for me. Once I stepped through it, I never looked back. Badmotorfinger acted as a gatekeeper, an agent of intense personal change. Yet it didn't remain in an exalted place for long as other heavier and more interesting bands arranged themselves for my listening attention.

As a rural, upstate New York adolescent in 1991, access to interesting and diverse music was a difficult proposition. That was why my early tape collection was so heavily influenced by my Chicago cousin. I had only MTV to go by. The classic rock radio station didn't go past 1980 and I could only get issues of Metal Maniacs on rare trips into the city. So there was a poverty of access. That would change in '92 when grunge blew up and the prelude to that was Badmotorfinger prominently displayed on the new releases shelf of my local strip mall music store. Something about the band's name, album title, and logo struck me and I picked it up sight-unseen. I was greeted with an album full of heavy blues-based riffage and shrill melodic vocals with catchy hooks and choruses. At the time, it was revelatory. Not too heavy. Not even heavier than the Sabbath albums I owned (and those were over twenty years old at that point). And more importantly, it was accessible. Songs like "Slaves & Bulldozers," with its creepy atmospherics and wailing choruses, and "Outshined" with its deep Sabbath blues riffs, really stuck with me. I loved the crunching bite of the second-chorus riff to "Jesus Christ Pose" and the swirling psychedelia of "Somewhere." But what I loved about these songs, I soon found elsewhere -- other bands who gave me a stronger, heavier shot of what Soundgarden made me realize I was looking for.

In retrospect, this is a very strong hard rock/heavy metal record. I'm not sure what it really had to do with grunge or alternative besides being a coincidence of location, which made for a convenient marketing package. Badmotorfinger instead is so steeply rooted in a mid-70's psychedelic rock and proto-doom template that if anything it should be condemned for aping Sabbath & Zeppelin too heavily rather than for being so routinely associated with non-metal acts like Nirvana and Mudhoney. Consequently, I find there is much to enjoy here while acknowledging that I was too young and naive at 13 to recognize how derivative this record really is. The songwriting is generally strong. The riffs are tight, crunchy, and memorable. I cannot altogether consider them truly heavy anymore but they do deliver a crisp memorable punch. The rhythm section hits the right levels of bombast and swing but there is nothing too spectacular about them. My ears can no longer handle Chris Cornell's shrill high-end hysterics but his overall vocal performance is solid. The album just doesn't excite me like it used to. It's solid, dependable, well-crafted but ultimately pale in the light.