Chris Cornell

Covers from the late, great singer.

The fifth and final studio album from Chris Cornell, No One Sings Like You Anymore is songs chosen and sequenced by the singer himself. It was recorded in 2016, a year before his death, with the aid of multi-instrumentalist and producer Brendan O’Brien, and it indicates new directions that the former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman intended to take: a range of covers, songs originally made famous by artists as disparate as Harry Nilsson (Jump Into The Fire), electro-dance duo Ghostland Observatory (Sad Sad City) and Prince (Nothing Compares 2 U). It’s near impossible to listen to without the pointed barb of the album title (drawn from a lyric in Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun) prickling the listener. A melancholy, bittersweet listening experience indeed.

Forget Cornell’s scream for one moment. The dude could sing. He had soul in abundance. Forget the Black Sabbath and Zeppelin comparisons. The artist this posthumous collection recalls most is Otis Redding – another singer who died too early. Like Redding, Cornell had the knack of taking songs. He also had the breadth of vision (some might term it audacity) to mess with the form – so the Janis Joplin song () becomes a quirky new-wave synth-fest, ELO’s is turned into a soul stomper, Lennon’s slightly cynical becomes oddly translucent, upbeat, refusing to be cowed by the depression that clearly plagued Cornell.