( Rolling Stone ) -- `` I got nowhere to go ever since I came back , '' Chris Cornell growls over a warped-alloy guitar charge on `` Been Away Too Long , '' the lead single from the first Soundgarden album since 1996 . He 's singing about Seattle , about coming home after years away and feeling out of place in his own hometown . He 's also talking about a sound : the grunge his band helped define , and which once dominated rock 's mainstream . Now , there is n't much of a rock mainstream left to dominate ; big , heavy , high-protein bands like Soundgarden are all but extinct . Which is exactly why `` King Animal '' is a weirdly cool beast to encounter in 2012 -- like running into a mastodon in a Melvins T-shirt . The band 's sound manages to be as ageless as it is anachronistic . Soundgarden were the crusty hard-rock true believers amid alt-rock 's self-appointed revolutionaries : If Nirvana wanted to shred your world and Pearl Jam strove to redeem it , Cornell , guitarist Kim Thayil , bassist Ben Shepherd and drummer Matt Cameron wanted to take you out in the woods with a six-pack and headbang to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath . King Animal shows they have n't forgotten how to stomp out the jams : Thayil is still a warlock guitar conjurer of the first order , and Cornell rolls around his multi-octave vocal range like some kind of backwoods metal-Mariah . The album follows their root sound down all kinds of mossy paths -- from the South Asia-meets-New Orleans blues burn of `` Black Saturday '' to `` A Thousand Days Before , '' a snake-hipped meditation on the impermanence of life . Naturally , its centerpiece moment is its heaviest : `` Blood on the Valley Floor , '' where sumptuously evil riffs fall like redwoods as Cornell spools out images of war as mindless decadence . `` The blood dries while we spill , '' he sings . `` Endless summer . '' Peter Travers Ranks All 24 James Bond Movies . It 's a quintessentially Soundgarden moment : overpowering but self-loathing . What made them `` grunge '' and not just a new kind of old metal was their dire , brutal despair . The band 's greatest songs -- miasmic punishers like `` Black Hole Sun '' or `` Fell on Black Days , '' from their 1994 watershed , Superunknown -- undercut massive music with lyrics about helplessness and depression . Being Seattle in the Nineties , that helplessness suggested drug abuse . But `` King Animal '' was recorded by sober dudes in their forties -- the hymnlike `` Bones of Birds '' is about the challenges of parenting , and `` Halfway There '' is a matter-of-fact take on class stagnation : `` Something to eat ? /I would say you 're doing better than most , though maybe not as well as some , '' Cornell observes . The Best Aerosmith Songs of All Time . That line could describe Cornell 's years post-Soundgarden : supergroup success with Tom Morello in Audioslave , then a decade wandering the post-alt-rock solo wilderness , complete with a Timbaland-produced electro-rock puzzler ( 2009 's Scream ) . After years of failed reinvention , the guy on King Animal sounds content to be himself . `` Do n't know where I 'm going/I just keep on rowing , '' he moans like a mantra , awash in black swirls of industrial-strength murk on the album 's closing track . It 's that old-time sludge that carries him home . Review : Neil Young and Crazy Horse . Copyright © 2011 Rolling Stone .
` ` Been Away Too Long '' is the first single from the first studio album since 1986 . The band 's sound claims to be as progressive as it is anachronistic . The album follows their root sound down all sorts of different paths .