Album Review, Soundgarden, "Badmotorfinger"

Seattle's premier sub-poppers go one step beyond Louder Than Love with an album that is sure to elevate them higher and open up a wider audience beyond the indie metalite.

Badmotorfinger is heavier, harder, and more direct than anything before and has a gutsy originality absent among so many mirrors in the market place. Sure they sound like SABBATH at times but they still reveal a refreshing approach to each individual song and create some of the best noises around. Looping guitars, crashing shuddering swirls, unrelenting riffs, and fuzzed out madness all help to make the perfect cross between off-the-wall hard edge and explosive force.

Some of the songs aren't that hot but with Chris Cornell's voice in a class of its own, he always manages to save the day. Drawing Flies and Room A Thousand Years Wide edge it as the best cuts and as they rip into my speakers to remind me that Badmotorfinger is an album of lasting quality, I know SOUNDGARDEN fans will be heavily in favour and savour the meaner mood.

Grade B

Mike Harris
Riff Raff
October 1991

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!