Reflections on Soundgarden and Bruckner Symphonies
by Paul J. Pelkonen
"They want me to write differently. Certainly I could, but I must not."
--Anton Bruckner
"We do this basically for ourselves. People appreciate it, which is cool, but I think they appreciate that we're doing it for ourselves. We're doing it our way, and how people like it is not up to us. We like it."
--James Hetfield of Metallica
So last night my friend Rob Pantuliano and I went to Newark, NJ to see the resurrected '90s grunge band Soundgarden play the Prudential Center. For the uninitiated, Soundgarden were the loudest, and one of the heaviest bands to come out of that Seattle scene, combining unusual time signatures, shrieked vocals and a slow, sludgy, heavy sound produced by tuning the guitars and bass down to D or C, and occasionally, all the way down to a low B. They broke up in 1997, but are currently enjoying a renaissance.
by Paul J. Pelkonen
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| Devastating bass: Ben Shepherd of Soundgarden. Photo by the Author. © 2011 by me. |
--Anton Bruckner
--James Hetfield of Metallica
So last night my friend Rob Pantuliano and I went to Newark, NJ to see the resurrected '90s grunge band Soundgarden play the Prudential Center. For the uninitiated, Soundgarden were the loudest, and one of the heaviest bands to come out of that Seattle scene, combining unusual time signatures, shrieked vocals and a slow, sludgy, heavy sound produced by tuning the guitars and bass down to D or C, and occasionally, all the way down to a low B. They broke up in 1997, but are currently enjoying a renaissance.
