Chris Cornell, Euphoria Morning, A&M, 1999

Chris Cornell, Euphoria Morning, A&M, 1999

In which the voice of our beloved and dearly departed Soundgarden proves you can get sappy while continuing to radiate the kind of heat that wilts daisies at fifty paces. Working with Alain Johannes and Natasha Shneider of the Los Angeles group Eleven - and with fond memories of Abbey Road -- Chris Cornell answers questions of whither his art after grunge with an album long on interpersonal melodrama and even longer on baroque song forms.

Cornell's music resides somewhere between shameless bombast and unrepentant beauty, and Euphoria Morning provides him ample room to show off Macho Man sides and Mr. Vulnerability tendencies, often in the same tune. Eschewing the shuttered-room metaphysics and Sturm und Drang of his previous engagement, Cornell proffers sentiments worthy of sonnets. The first song (and first single), "Can't Change Me," is as rhapsodically gorgeous as pop gets, putting a spin on true love that any reprobate slacker can relate to: "She's going to change the world/But she can't change me/Suddenly I can see everything that's wrong with me/But what can I do?/I'm the only thing I really have at all." Cornell unveils a desire to be reckoned with as an openly wounded and unabashedly portentous rock balladeer. At its most musically and lyrically resolute, this passion results in heart wringers on the order of "Can't Change Me" and "Preaching the End of the World," both writ on a sonic canvas large enough to fit all the stars, moons and planets in the heavens. In "Preaching," Cornell displays a ferocity from somewhere halfway between Vegas and the twilight zone while singing of the need to find that special friend for the apocalypse.

Cornell's Godzillian tenor has always been one of the true wonders of this rock & roll age. It sounds like nothing so much as the roar of a fallen soulman who punched, scratched and kicked his way out of some holy-roller church basement to grow punk-rock fangs, conquer the world and then cry about it later. Nobody does lamentation and melancholia more furiously than Cornell - think of Temptation David Ruffin's pipes grafted onto Iggy Pop's zeal. On the church-piano-saturated "When I'm Down," the singer gets to make his R&B and gospel yearnings outright explicit. On his Jeff Buckley elegy, "Wave Goodbye," he marries funk and prog rock as benightedly as the Artist ever has.

Cornell, Johannes and Shneider have woven a formidable delicacy and intricacy into each song. The raucous tom drumming in "Can't Change Me" puts the savagery we associate with early Motown back into pure pop; the mixture of digital tricknology and acoustic- and vintage-electric-guitar sounds on "Flutter Girl" honors Cornell's ardor for Sgt. Pepper's. In the duo from Eleven, Cornell has wisely chosen comrades who can get their heads around his outer limits and fluently speak the vocabulary he's nicked from his Soundgarden self - weird tunings, odd meters, hurdy-gurdy contrapuntality, science-fiction-score crescendos and all.

The downside of these humongous expressions of passion may be that you'll get worn out by Cornell's belting before the album is halfway over. Comparisons between the solo project and Soundgarden are inevitable and unfair, but they do point up why Euphoria Morning sounds more than a little restless and overachieving. In Soundgarden, Cornell was surrounded by guys whose intelligence, ferocity and virtuosity not only matched his own but actually flattened out his voice enough to keep it from seeming as Cyclopean as it sometimes does here - like a freak of nature undecided between being a simple shepherd or a devourer of men. The difference is akin to that of some Wild Surfer Joe hollering aloft a fifty-foot breaker and that same guy set loose in Times Square. As was true of Soundgarden albums, Euphoria Morning is a recording more memorable for its cathartic performances and complex arrangements than for great songs. Excepting "Can't Change Me,'' none of the songs will make you go out of your head trying not to hum a few bars when you get up in the morning. But if you're looking to be viscerally and intellectually bowled over, this is music that satisfies the need. (RS 822)

Greg Tate - Rolling Stone

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