Review: "Scream" by Chris CornellSometimes music isn’t only music. If you’re a
synaesthete like me, sometimes it turns into a kind of psychedelic geometry – shapes, colours, movement, sensation. Chords are hot or cold, rough or smooth, notes gain shades of colour or depth of field, rhythms taste salty or sweet, silences burn. This is one of those albums.
When I first heard it, quite a while ago now - this
Scream left me shaken. Coming at music from anywhere but hiphop, perhaps I expected Cornell’s collaboration with Timbaland to mean some kind of dilution. To have to go looking for what I wanted under an overlay of something else.
Carry On had been a book of short stories, an exploration with an uncertain ending: I knew this would be something more cohesive, a power jolt, but I wasn’t ready for the sheer size of the shock. I was expecting something like Bowie’s
Let’s Dance, a subtly subversive shot at the mainstream. What I got was closer to
Earthling.
No – despite what you might have read here and there,
Scream actually isn’t an easy listen. Sleek enough to slide under the radar to target the casual listener, its darker content may escape those looking for non-stop sunshine or a critical mass of heavy riffage. And in the sadly unimaginative world of
rawk, expectations are easily confounded. Take away the genre signifiers – heavy guitars, live drums – and many won’t recognise what lies beneath.
Which is a shame, because although it might be wearing party clothes, Scream is a dense, complex and sometimes harrowing piece of work: imagine
Superunknown remade with different tools, its band dynamic replaced with a dialogue between a great singer/songwriter and a great sonic imagineer. Together, Cornell and Timbaland have drawn on developments within the eclectic European scene to create a new musical hybrid which invokes the underground dance clubs of Paris, Oslo or Lake Garda as much as the arenas of the global rock circuit.
Timbaland’s sonic kaleidoscope challenges and supports Cornell’s peerless voice by turns; sometimes brutally sparse, sometimes surging and splashing around the layered vocals and sputtering beats like boiling sugar. Emotions rear up unexpectedly, fear stalks the back of a phrase or lurks inside a harmony, the sun comes out on a cadence or a scream unzips the sky and makes it rain. It’s a cavalcade of shapes and colours, a kind of electronic zoo in which all kinds of creatures spawn and frolic.
Songs ebb and flow into each other like scenes along a river. Centrepiece "Take Me Alive" – with backing vocals by Justin Timberlake - is "Kashmir" meets Bollywood, its dark imagery both sinuous and sinister. Title track and US single Scream ends with the clanking trudge of a retreating army before an electronic hornpipe drops us into the murky hell of "Enemy". The neo-disco stylings somehow turn an already dark song into something truly terrifying – a danse macabre, a relentless ballet of stylised self-hatred. It’s the album’s most disturbing moment.
Cornell’s lyrics have evolved over time from impressionism into expressionism, learning to wear their black heart on their sleeve. Instead of spinning oblique metaphors which keep the listener at a polite distance, he now pulls you directly into his nightmare: “no price/nothing I pay will make it all right/nothing I see
will make it lose sight/nothing I take will make me sleep at night”.
Elsewhere his elegant trademark wordplay reasserts itself, with dystopian lines like “the perfect present is no longer the future”. There are Chandleresque excursions into storytelling – we meet the guilty adventurer of “Other Side Of Town”, the hapless victim of a dancehall temptress in “Part Of Me”, the hellcat-on-wheels of “Watch Out”. Perhaps none of them are Cornell, or perhaps all of them are. Like the music which surrounds them, these lyrics are prismatic, reflecting differently depending on where you stand.
Maybe
Scream will revive the lost art of the concept album, though it doesn’t so much tell a story as follow an emotional arc, a hallucinogenic journey through heaven and hell. This is a huge, 3D production, a cinematic creation from its crazy opening fanfare to the sound of film running off projector spools which brings it to closure.
Or...almost to its closure. The jokey bit of off-the-cuff studio verité which ushers in final track "Watch Out" isn’t the only snatch of the blues we hear: after a long silence, hidden track "Two Drink Minimum" rounds off the set with a slice of survival, distant cousin of Audioslave’s "The Last Remaining Light". Cornell says he recorded it as the sun came up at 6 am after a long night in the studio:
Scream leaves you with the same sense of having made it through the night to morning.
Excellent and fair.