Concert review: Chris Cornell is stuck between hard places

Chris Cornell: coming soon to a rib fest, state fair or suburban rock bar near you.

The frontman for two of America's biggest hard-rock bands of the past 15 years, Soundgarden and Audioslave, came to the Orpheum Theatre on Monday with a band of hired guns and a surprisingly long list of familiar songs. A good time was had by all.

Instead of coming off as the rebirth of a solo career, though, Monday's two-hour concert suggested that Cornell might spend the next couple decades coasting on his past couple decades. The three-quarters-full audience got a lot of amped-up but cut-rate nostalgia, cheapened by the fact that none of Cornell's original bandmates were in tow, and none of his new music even came close to the older stuff.

Cornell, 42, is touring behind his second solo CD, "Carry On" (his first was a little-heard 1999 disc, from which he only played one song). The new album finds him awkwardly dabbling in soft-rock and soul balladry. It even includes an embarrassingly dark, brooding cover of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" that sounded even more melodramatic Monday during a solo acoustic set.

The crowd added to the clumsiness by singing Jackson's falsetto "eee-ooo" cries at the right moments (but wrong show).

Tactically wrapped around the new material was a criss-crossing cross-section of Cornell classics. Two Soundgarden tracks, "Let Me Drown" and "Outshined," opened the show, followed by one Audioslave cut, "Show Me How to Live." That formula kept up through the pre-encore finale of "Jesus Christ Pose" and "Be Yourself," the latter of which came off as one of two swipes toward Audioslave. The other came right before "What You Are."This is a song about breaking away from something that sucks, and doing what you want to do," Cornell said (never mind the irony of him saying it before one of the six Audioslave songs on the set list).

Cornell's pick-up band looked like a group of guys he snagged from a Guitar Center. They were able and eager, but didn't mesh into anything special.

One especially big problem was the fact that Cornell's undeniably powerful voice -- mostly spot-on Monday -- was always pushed front-and-center in the sonic mix, and thus buried the ferocious six-string shredding that defined such songs as "Rusty Cage" and "Cochise." But hey, no one would probably notice that at a rib fest anyway.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658 • chrisr@startribune.com