Louder Than Love
Soundgarden
A & M Records, 1989
REVIEW BY: Sean McCarthy
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 12/09/1998
No other cassette has come close to doing the damage that Louder Than Love did to my music collection. The year-1989.I was still teethering between my 'keepin' it real' skater pals andmy pop-metal cravings. Let's see, Poison, White Lion, Winger,Stryper, Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Metallica, Anthrax, Megadethor...Def Leppard. A bridge had to be burned.
In comes Circus magazine. In a small, isolated article, I read apositively glowing review of Louder Than Love, from this group called Soundgarden. Thereview was so powerful, I went out and picked up the cassette. Thepower of the written word-perfect- a perfect example of its power,mainly due to the fact that there was no way in hell that Louder Than Love would be played on the radio stations.
So, armed with that cassette, my friend and I retreated back tomy room where we engaged in the usual Saturday afternoon rituals.Metal Gear on the Nintendo, a small bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and abig ass glass of Mountain Dew. The moment I pushed 'play,' a pathwould be paved. A path that, due to my then Beavis-like tendencies,resulted in the smashing of nearly two-thirds of my hair-metalcassette tape collection.
Such baptismals are never pretty. And Louder Than Love was as pretty as a medieval bludgeoninginstrument. Unlike some of the speed metal that I had, Louder Than Love's pace was rather slow. It felt likesludges of lava were in my room (and that was before I discoveredalcohol). For a pace so slow, Louder Than Love sounded inexpliciably heavy.
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