That”s more like it. After Soundgarden returned earlier this year with the perfect pleasant but rather generic “Live To Rise” from “The Avengers,” today we got a better taste of what to expect on “King Animal,” the band”s first album since 1996″s “Down On the Upside.”
“Been Away Too Long” is a hard-charging, snarling rock blast with a wicked little Middle Eastern guitar lick that inserts itself briefly before it sounds like someone starts banging on a trashcan lid.
[More after the jump…]
On the song, which leaked briefly yesterday before being yanked by the label, Chris Cornell has had enough of us… or someone. “This place has a special kind of falling apart/Like they put the whole thing together in the dark. No one knows where the edge of the knife it/And no one knows where intelligent life it.”
“Been Away Too Long” harks back to Soundgarden”s early days, where guitars crashed into each other to form a holy racket. So while Cornell opens the tune singing, “You can”t go home,” from the sounds of this song, it turns out that you can.
“King Animal comes out Nov. 13.