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.
