Scream

Though this hook-up frequently pushes at the boundaries of plausibility, there's lots about Scream that makes perfect sense.

This is a startling new direction, and while not entirely successful, it confirms Cornell as a vocalist of versatility and strength.

The new environment rejuvenates Mr. Cornell for good and bad: he sounds shallower than he was before but pithier too.

Scream may be the most compelling train wreck of an album in recent memory.

Scream has balls, Cornell vacating his comfort zone with admirable readiness. [Apr 2009, p.98]

Sometimes it's good bizarre. Other times it's bad bizarre.

Produced with a heavy hand by Timbaland, the third solo album from ex-Soundgarden and Audioslave singer Chris Cornell is strangely appealing in its elaborately empty efficiency.

The resulting dynamic is two distinct flowers from the sound garden that produce an only occasionally sweet-smelling bouquet.

The problem with Scream isn’t that Cornell is too much of an artist to go pop, it’s that the fit is so unbecoming.

Their collaboration suggests a nice philosophical dissonance, but only in theory. In practice, Scream is nearly awful.

Timbaland, who has sprinkled his hip-hop fairy dust on weaker voices, rinses away Cornell's inherent dirt and power, and compresses the godfather of grunge until he squawks.

There are flickers of funky light on the lush old school soul of ‘Ground Zero’ and the Motown-esque ‘Other Side Of Town’, but for the most part it’s all depressingly castrated.

It never seems like a collaboration, it seems like it was assembled by committee, discussed in boardrooms, farmed out to contract players and stitched together on computer.

What we get when we put the pieces together: an album where every single song is approximately the same length; an album where you could take apart any one track, combine those segments with other stray bits of the album, and still have the same basic entity you started with; an album whose choruses consist of phrases like “No, that bitch ain’t a part of me” repeated eight times; an album that, above all else, does not want you to think about it too hard.

The idea of Cornell's sex-god wail over Timbaland's mechanized funk is appealing. But Scream draws out the worst tendencies in both of them.

Timbaland rose to the challenge of making Chris Cornell a solo star by producing arguably the worst album he’s ever had a hand in.

Scream veers between drab–sleek and rock–dude soulful; Cornell's yowl never sounds at home.