When Soundgarden released Screaming Life, their 1987 debut EP, grunge was not a thing. There were a few other bands slinging the sludgy sound that would soon be known to the world at large as grunge, but those groups—chief among them Soundgarden’s Washington State neighbors Green River, Malfunkshun, and the Melvins—barely shared characteristics. (Nirvana and Alice in Chains, meanwhile, were just finding their feet at the time.) The most striking element that set Soundgarden apart was their commercial viability: Of their peers, Soundgarden had the catchiest songs, the sexiest frontman in Chris Cornell, and the most conventional approach to making music. Catchiness, sexiness, and conventionality were all things grunge would eventually, if briefly, pretend to refute. From the start, though, Soundgarden’s music envisioned—if not promised—a nation of arenas full of flannel.
Screaming Life is proof. Along with its 1988 follow-up, the Fopp EP, it’s being reissued by Sub Pop—only this time with a needed Jack Endino remastering job and one bonus track, the jokey throwaway jam “Sub Pop Rock City”, drawn from 1988’s Sub Pop 200 compilation. The latter is sheer filler, as is the six-minute dub version of Fopp’s title track and the passable, unremarkable cover of Green River’s seminal “Swallow My Pride”. That leaves eight songs out of 11 worth listening to on the reissue—some more than others. Revisionists tend to gauge Soundgarden solely in the context of grunge, but Screaming Life—and the two songs on Fopp worth listening to, “Fopp” and “Kingdom of Come”—have more in common with what was truly going on in alternative metal circa 1987 and 88: Jane’s Addiction, the Cult, and even Living Colour, each of whom sought to expand the tropes of metal by cross-pollinating it with other styles—not to mention weaving a shroud of alluring otherness in the face of bad-boys-next-door like Mötley Crüe or Poison. The fact that “Fopp” is a thickened cover of the Ohio Players’ 70s funk classic shows that, in a parallel universe, Soundgarden could just have easily turned into Faith No More.
But they didn’t. Soundgarden wound up drawing from a broad palette while avoiding the funk-metal trap that so many of their contemporaries succumbed to. Even their breakthrough albums—1991’s Badmotorfinger and 1994’s Superunknown—owe more to progressive rock and psychedelia, respectively, than to grunge. Some of that structural oddness and swirling murk can be heard on Screaming Life, albeit sporadically. If anything, Screaming Life comes on like gothic Led Zeppelin. “Hunted Down” is cavernous and “Immigrant Song”-like in its pseudo-mythic chug, while “Tears to Forget” echoes the metallic gallop of “Communication Breakdown”. Cornell’s voice veers from Robert Plant majesty—steeped, though, in deeper shadows—to a scalding screech that he’d soon ditch in favor of a more melodic wail. “Entering” starts out with a drumbeat that resembles, of all things, Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” before morphing into lesser groove-rock aerobics. Finally tapping into the Black Sabbath wellspring that came to be a grunge stereotype, Soundgarden turns “Nothing to Say” into a ringing, doom-laden drone. “Little Joe” is Screaming Life’s lone disposable track, another foray into stiff-necked quasi-funk that feels squishy and unformed, as do Cornell’s monotone histrionics.
He’d get better from there, as would all of Soundgarden. Not that you’d know it listening to “Kingdom of Come”—a would-be party anthem complete with douchey double entendre that wastes the talent of Kim Thayil, turning one of the most subtly inventive guitarists of his generation into a vending machine for riffs. It in no way predicts what the band was about to accomplish on its brooding, full-length debut for SST, 1988’s Ultramega OK, let alone during its stunning major-label years. Soundgarden would go on to become the most challenging of the mainstream grunge titans; 1996’s Down on the Upside is every inch as dense and harrowing as In Utero. But in 1987, Soundgarden had no way of knowing that rock as they knew it was about to radically change around them. Grunge has long been touted as the revolutionary insurrection that rendered hair-metal obsolete. But Screaming Life/Fopp is music that seemed to want to save hair-metal, not do away with it. And in that sense, it’s a halting, hesitant half-triumph.
