Pop Music Review : Cornell Ambles Into Life After Grunge

The grunge-rock movement might have been anti-star, but it certainly had its heroes. Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell was usually ranked with Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder as a rock role model for the disaffected fans who found solace in his yearning, bluesy wail and his search for a place in an indifferent world.

Now Cornell has become the first high-profile figure from that community to break away into his own orbit, releasing his first solo album this week and marking the occasion with two concerts at the Henry Fonda Theatre.

His peers might be watching closely to see how it goes, because they’ll probably be following suit as the grunge diaspora begins. Cobain’s 1994 suicide and Soundgarden’s 1997 breakup, combined with the rock audience’s turn to new heroes, have gutted the momentum of the music that dominated rock in the first half of the ‘90s.

What will these musicians, now in their 30s, bring to the table after spending their youth raging against the moral ambiguity and scars of isolation? Cornell’s step into the unknown in the new “Euphoria Morning” album is somewhat tentative, but at his Fonda Theatre concert Tuesday, he demonstrated more forcefully how a brooding grunge-rocker can mature into a brooding artist of no fixed address.

Cornell, 35, hasn’t abandoned the principles of moody hard-rock that marked his Soundgarden years, but he has stretched out with richer melodies and a more colorful sonic range. While the album’s many slow and mid-tempo pieces often bog down in lugubriousness and vague, impressionistic lyrics, such songs as “Preaching the End of the World” and “Wave Goodbye” find anger giving way to a tolerance and vulnerability that was rare in grunge-land.

But in his new incarnation, Cornell had trouble putting all this across on Tuesday. His natural, regular-guy appeal was intact, but he was unable to instill his performance with a special urgency, a sense that there’s something important at stake.

His singing itself--steely, supple, powerful and inherently mournful--certainly gives that impression, and while Tuesday’s concert could have used more variety in pace and tone, the dynamism of the musicians’ interplay kept things lively.

Strictly speaking, Cornell hasn’t gone solo at all, instead forming a full collaboration with the team of guitarist Alain Johannes and keyboardist Natasha Schneider, who co-produced the album with Cornell and co-wrote half its songs. The two Los Angeles musicians stood as near-equals with Cornell on stage, and, in fact, the animated Schneider often drew the eye away from the lanky singer. Maybe she’ll be the one who inspires him to take command.

* Chris Cornell plays Dec. 2 at the Wiltern Theatre, 3790 Wilshire Blvd., 8 p.m. $22.50, on sale Saturday. (213) 380-5005.