Soundgarden’s grungey return leaves little to complain about in Vancouver

Taking it up a notch was the night’s other guest, Queens of the Stone Age, which seemed to benefit greatly, soundwise, from the fact that the rink was well padded with bodies by the time it hit the stage. Even though it often had three guitars raging at once, the Josh Homme-led quintet from Palm Desert, California, mostly overcame the soul-withering sound mix that had tortured the Puppets.

“You guys are sick, sick, sick, sick, sick,” declared singer-guitarist Homme when it came time to bang out “Sick, Sick, Sick”, a tune off the band’s last album, 2007’s Era Vulgaris. When he introduced one song as being “about telling authority to go fuck itself,” many in the party-hearty crowd took that as a cue to spark up joints, the show’s heavy security presence be damned. No doubt a lot of the tokers were also fans of Homme’s previous stoner-metal act, Kyuss.

QOTSA’s exhilirating set lit the audience’s fuse, and by the time Soundgarden took the stage the near-capacity crowd was psyched for action. The classic lineup of singer Chris Cornell, guitarist Kim Thayil, bassist Ben Shepherd, and drummer Matt Cameron didn’t spend a lot of time with chit-chat, but got straight to work churning out the riff-driven, Sabbath-influenced hits that ruled the airwaves back in the early- to mid-”˜90s.

The brunt of the band’s 20-some-odd-song set was taken from the double-platinum 1991 Badmotorfinger album (“Rusty Cage”, “Outshined”, “Jesus Christ Pose”, “Searching With My Good Eye Closed”) and its five-times-platinum 1994 followup, Superunknown (“Fell on Black Days”, “My Wave”, “The Day I Tried to Live”, “Spoonman”, “Black Hole Sun”).

Back in the group’s heyday the swaying vibe of the latter tune would have led large portions of the crowd to salute it with Bic lighters held on high, but that habit has long been usurped by the mass illumination of camera phones.

Although Soundgarden’s performance wasn’t the stuff of legend, it left little to complain about. Cornell can still screech with the best of them, Thayil brings the six-string dynamite, and the rhythm section is a formidable force. Cameron’s colossal drumwork definitely made him the night’s MVP.

The group ended its three-song encore with the Badmotorfingertrack “Slaves & Bulldozers”, bolstering it with a few Zeppelinesque bars of the traditional gospel-blues song “In My Time of Dying”. Considering the quartet’s obvious indebtedness to the monster riffs of Tony Iommi, it would have been more apt if it had figured out a way to incorporate a Black Sabbath tune instead.

But that might have been just a bit too perfect.

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