Chris Cornell
No One Sings Like You Anymore

Three years after her husband's suicide in 2017, Chris Cornell's widow gave the green light for the release of this posthumous album, containing ten covers sung and played by Cornell with only the help of his producer Brendan O'Brien. The work was conceived, including the choice of songs and their position in the lineup, by Chris himself, so it is not a scraping of the barrel, but the formal publication of an organic project realized during his lifetime, only halted by his unfortunate death when it needed only mixing and mastering.

The title of the work is extracted from the second verse of "Black Hole Sun", the famous Soundgarden song, but it surely also bears a significance of expressing Vicky Cornell's thoughts about her husband's art. And rightly so… nobody can sing, then now and always, like the man from Seattle, no doubt: a sublime mix of explosive grunge fury and devastating unhappiness, even in this "minor" setting, dealing with very varied and often light covers, if you will, some of them originally being straightforward rhythm & blues or even consumer pop songs.

Their interpretation by the great and unfortunate singer conveys, without exception, admiration and discomfort, strength, and disturbance. The record is short, but inevitably intense. I am particularly moved by listening to "Nothing Compares to You", the one by Prince and O’Connor, the marvelous "Patience" by Guns'n'Roses, and unexpectedly "San Sad City", an electro dance piece by Ghostland Observatory completely transfigured by Chris. The other artists reinterpreted are the very last John Lennon of "Watching the Wheels" and then Janis Joplin, Harry Nilsson, Carl Hall, Electric Light Orchestra, Terry Reid, Lorraine Ellison.

Depression and chronic unhappiness are truly cruel and hard-to-accept diseases. They deprived us of a great artist who performed like no one else, perhaps even driven by his undeserved punishment on this earth. But so it is. It seems there will eventually be a second posthumous Cornell album on the same tones, and this time I suspect the barrel will be scraped… After all, Jimi Hendrix fared much, much worse. Let's hope it will be as good as this one is.