I have no idea why Chris Cornell even exists anymore.

Going by this album, he’s not sure either. ‘Carry On’, his second proper solo album and first album after that grotesque assemblage, Audioslave, fell apart, flails about in a variety of directions, trying to cop a sludgy grunge riff here, some psychedelia there, a bit of blues, a lot of jangly home-on-the-range chords and ultimately goes nowhere at all. With this album, Cornell has finally embraced his post-Soundgarden destiny – to make AoR music for grown-up grunge kids.
 

The album begins by trying to nod to past glories with a halfway decent riff on ‘No Such Thing’. But the riff is hobbled by a totally toothless mix, and a complete disinterest in taking it to any of the interesting places it could have gone on a better album. After this, Cornell plunges headlong into sappy balladry, trying to keep it a little edgy at first with ‘Poison Eye’, but descending into full-on goo soon afterwards on ‘Arms Around Your Love’, which sounds as horrible as you’d expect, and ‘Safe And Sound’. Even some ostensibly psychedelic dithering around with background textures cannot save this saccharine hunk of junk from itself or Cornell’s vocals, which sound like a slightly manlier version of that fellow in Mr. Big.  But that isn’t really who his vocals remind me of – oh, who can it be? And then, ‘She’ll Never Be Your Man’, with its ripped-of-from-Bowie-via-Nirvana guitar part starts in and it hits me. I have memories of a fellow with red dreadlocks in a colourful shawl wandering through a desert and crooning out an early-90s pop hit in an early-90s pop video, in an early-90s white soul voice. I see a glimpse of a diamond-encrusted tooth in my mind’s eye. Holy crap. Chris Cornell sounds like that fellow from Simply Red!
 

I am now very disturbed.
 

I also start noticing how much his vocal phrasing also sounds like Sting, after he started seriously sucking donkey gonads, instead of just doing it part time for a few songs on each album. ‘Killing Birds’ with its acoustic chords and delicate little layers of electric guitar does nothing to reduce this impression. His falsettos are total Mick Hucknall cloneage! After this, the rest of the album flies part in a nauseous haze. The only thing that really stands out is that the best song on the album wasn’t written by Cornell at all, but by Michael Jackson.
 

And it still isn’t a good song.


To sum up: no. Do no listen to this album. Do not buy it, sell it, copy it, distribute it or in any way contribute to its infliction on any living thing, including the ones who club baby seals to death for a living. No one deserves this punishment.

0.5 Thadiyans out of 5.  (yes, that’s half a thadiyan)

Year of Release: 2007

Label: Suretone/Interscope