Louder Than Love - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Steve Huey of Allmusic said that Soundgarden took "a step toward the metal mainstream" with "a slow, grinding, detuned mountain of Sabbath/Zeppelin riffs and Chris Cornell wailing." At the time the band was trying to avoid the "heavy metal" label, with guitarist Kim Thayil stating that the band's sound was "as much influenced by British bands like Killing Joke and Bauhaus as it is by heavy metal." Cornell said that the band's sound is "enough for anyone into speed metal, but we're heavy rock...Neo-metal maybe."

Some songs on the album feature unusual or unorthodox time signatures. "Get On The Snake", for example, is played in 9/4. "I Awake" uses 4/4, 6/4, 9/8, 11/8, and 14/8. "Gun" features varying tempos, which speed up and slow down over the course of the song. A lot of the songs on the album are tuned down to a drop D tuning.

Cornell said that "Hands All Over" is about how humans defile the environment, and that "Full on Kevin's Mom" is about "a friend of mine who slept with another friend of mine's mom. The guy who did it said to us, 'Yeah, full on Kevin's mom'." The lyrics of "I Awake" were originally part of a note written by Yamamoto's then girlfriend Kate McDonald. In the late 1990's, an urban legend circulated on internet message boards which stated that Yamamoto, after writing the music, wrote some lyrics on the back side of McDonald's note. When Yamamoto gave the paper containing these lyrics to Cornell, Cornell looked at the wrong side of the sheet and believed McDonald's note was the lyrics to Yamamoto's song. There was less material on the album intended as humorous compared with Ultramega OK. However, the song "Big Dumb Sex" was written as a parody of glam metal bands, who often metaphorically addressed sexual intercourse in their lyrics. The song, with its many uses of "fuck", was the reason the album gained a Parental Advisory sticker upon release.