Badmotorfinger
Soundgarden
A&M
Louder Than Love's Sabbath-meets-Spinal Tap iconoclasm lifted the group above post-punk cult status, but it was Badmotorfinger that properly established Soundgarden as both a musically visionary outfit and mainstream force to be reckoned with. At turns proggy ("Rusty Cage"), introspective ("Room a Thousand Years Wide"), catchy ("Drawing Flies") and blisteringly hard-core ("Face Pollution"), the group's second major-label outing captures the group at its most confident, creative and eclectic, and remains the best front-to-back album in the Soundgarden catalog.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2006.