Featuring members of
Soundgarden and what would soon become
Pearl Jam,
Temple of the Dog's lone eponymous album might never have reached a wide audience if not for
Pearl Jam's breakout success a year later. In turn, by providing the first glimpse of
Chris Cornell's more straightforward, classic rock-influenced side,
Temple of the Dog helped set the stage for
Soundgarden's mainstream breakthrough with
Superunknown. Nearly every founding member of
Pearl Jam appears on
Temple of the Dog (including the then-unknown
Eddie Vedder), so perhaps it isn't surprising that the record sounds like a bridge between
Mother Love Bone's theatrical '70s-rock updates and
Pearl Jam's hard-rocking seriousness. What is surprising, though, is that
Cornell is the dominant composer, writing the music on seven of the ten tracks (and lyrics on all). Keeping in mind that
Soundgarden's previous album was the overblown metallic miasma of
Louder Than Love, the accessibly warm, relatively clean sound of
Temple of the Dog is somewhat shocking, and its mellower moments are minor revelations in terms of
Cornell's songwriting abilities. It isn't just the band, either -- he displays more emotional range than ever before, and his melodies and song structures are (for the most part) pure, vintage hard rock. In fact, it's almost as though he's trying to write in the style of
Mother Love Bone -- which makes sense, since
Temple of the Dog was a tribute to that band's late singer
Andrew Wood. Not every song here is directly connected to
Wood; once several specific elegies were recorded, additional material grew quickly out of the group's natural chemistry. As a result, there's a very loose, jam-oriented feel to much of the album, and while it definitely meanders at times, the result is a more immediate emotional impact. The album's strength is its mournful, elegiac ballads, but thanks to the band's spontaneous creative energy and appropriately warm sound, it's permeated by a definite, life-affirming aura. That may seem like a paradox, but consider the adage that funerals are more for the living than the dead;
Temple of the Dog shows
Wood's associates working through their grief and finding the strength to move on. ~ Steve Huey
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