Why Chris, why? As a profoundly introverted and socially inept youth, Soundgarden were rock royalty to me: hell, I even went as far as to buy that terrible second Audioslave album (although at least I didn’t waste anything on the third…). ‘Superunknown’ is still one of the best unashamedly, full-on rock albums to come out of America in the nineties, but it’s hard to hear this as anything else but a full-on sonic kick in the balls for my fourteen year-old self.
Teaming up with respected hip-hop production maestro Timbaland might have seemed good on paper, but when both sides of the equation are well past their prime (Timbaland’s never going to top his early collaborations with Missy Elliot, while Cornell’s not been worth a damn since the first Audioslave record), it’s a recipe for disaster. Which, unsurprisingly, is exactly what ‘Part Of Me’ is. Desperately searching for something to re-ignite his creative spark, Chris Cornell’s got Timbaland to fart out some embarrassingly dated beats of a calibre he would have been ashamed of a few years back that, when combined with Cornell’s increasingly hack-like Robert Plant-isms, actually rip a hole in the space-time continuum to several years back (where, for the record, this would still be unforgivably shit). By the time the chorus’s lament of “That bitch ain’t a part of me!” rolls around, the only possible reaction is to bury your head in your hands, while remembering that this used to be the guy who sang “Jesus Christ Pose”. That no one thought to burn the master-tapes for this atrocity and spare everyone involved the embarrassment of inflicting this upon an unsuspecting public is frankly astonishing. If there’s a worse attempt at career-invention this year, then I’ll personally bite my own arse off.
Review by Mark Corcoran-Lettice
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