Soundgarden Album Recommendations: "Live From the Artists Den"

Album Recommendations: Live From the Artists Den

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Soundgarden

[#] Live From the Artists Den (2019)

Decent, but unessential live Soundgarden.

Reviewed July 7, 2025

As Soundgarden was converted from a legacy act to a posthumous one with the death of Chris Cornell in 2017, the vault live recordings to satisfy demand for new Soundgarden material have started flowing. (Not like there's not a whole unreleased album being hashed out or anything...) In 2013, the newly reformed Soundgarden appeared on Live From the Artists Den, a PBS show that puts famous acts in unconventional venues, and put on, well, a pretty average show. The group definitely still has their tightness, but you can imagine the years have taken their toll on Chris' voice, and the whole thing seems strangely unexciting.

Leaning heavily on the then-new King Animal tracks, perhaps it's just them having been written with Chris' weathered vocals in mind, but these translate best to the stage. There's a surprising amount of early Soundgarden in the set too, and the sludgy, slow, groovy confines of "Incessant Mace" or the still-demonic "Hunted Down" sound killer in their grizzled old age. It's the mid-career songs that have Chris reaching into his upper range, like "Spoonman" or "Burden in My Hand", that have the man croaking atonally—the less said about it, the better. Maybe it was all the cameras, maybe it's old age, but Live From the Artists Den is on the whole tastefully sedate, which isn't exactly how I like my Soundgarden.