Soundgarden's "Louder Than Love" is stoner metal

Soundgarden's 1989 sophomore album is generally tagged as Alternative Metal on most online metal resources & that's not an unfair assessment as there's a reasonable amount of what we'd go one to know as of grunge going on however I can't help but notice that there's a whole lot of stoner (both the metal & rock varieties) going on too. In fact, I'm pretty sure that if Louder Than Love" was released as someone's debut album today it'd be tagged as stoner. Just listen to tracks like "Ugly Truth", "Gun" or "Loud Love" & tell me those groovy, doomy riffs don't tick all of your stoner metal boxes. Then, on the rock side of the equation you get material like "Get On The Snake", "Full On Kevin's Mom" & "Big Dumb Sex" which sit very comfortably alongside the Kyuss' & Queens Of The Stone Ages in my opinion. And how can you deny the traditional doom metal credentials of "Power Trip" or the sludge metal instrumentation of "I Awake"? This record belongs in The Fallen just as much as it does in The Gateway so I'd like to see it receiving a dual Alternative Metal & Stoner Metal tag.

This nomination has been post in the Hall of Judgement.

I gave this album some listening and a review to see if I have what it takes to explore one of the earlier, classic grunge/alternative rock/metal bands. Now many of these songs I think of highly differently from what you think, Daniel. Let me count the ways... "Ugly Truth" has that groovy doomy riffing going on, but to my ears, it sounds a bit like Godflesh's hymns without any of the industrial part of the sound. "Gun" is probably the most accurate track in the stoner doom category. "Power Trip" was meant to parody glam metal, and despite the doomy riffing, it's closer to one of those moody glam metal ballads. "Get on the Snake" has the usual rock-on early alt-metal that has shaped this band's early sound. "Full on Kevin’s Mom" is as fast as earlier hardcore, while lighter and closer to hard rock. "Loud Love" has some stoner-like riffing while being more mid-paced. "I Awake" has that somber sludgy instrumentation for sure. And finally "Big Dumb Sex"... Are you sure you wanna compare that one to Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age? That's a full-on parody of the more mid-tempo glam metal songs that's hard to take seriously! So I would consider Louder Than Love an early grunge-ish alternative metal album with many of the songs experimenting with different styles, including 4 stoner/doom-sounding songs, two glam metal parodies, and two fast hard rock tracks. The amount of stoner metal in the album, from what I hear, is about 35%, a little under your 40% minimum. And the album was released a couple years before Kyuss and Motorpsycho released their own albums that would establish stoner metal as a genre. With that, I find stoner metal to be just a secondary genre for this Soundgarden album and will have to vote NO in your hall entry.

I just relistened to the album to see if I could see where you're coming from Andi. I have to say that I can't. I stand by everything I said. I don't hear any traditional hard rock whatsoever on "Louder Than Love". Certainly not glam metal. The riffs are built on groovy blues rock structures which brings them more into line with stoner. It's got Black Sabbath "Vol 4" influence all through it. The fact that Kyuss & Motorpsycho didn't release their albums for another couple of years is irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. Sabbath invented stoner metal in the early 1970's along with a slew of other metal genres.