Black Rain

Album: Telephantasm (2010)
Charted: 96
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Songfacts®:

  • This is the first single from American rock band Soundgarden's compilation album Telephantasm, the group's first CD in 13 years. Whilst this song was recorded during sessions for the 1991 album Badmotorfinger, the remaining eleven tracks have appeared on previous releases, including early independent and small-label albums.
  • This was the first single Soundgarden released since "Bleed Together" in 1997. It also marked their first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. In the '90s, some bands, including Soundgarden, didn't make their singles available for purchase in the United States, which helped album sales but kept them off the chart because Billboard stipulated that a song had to be a commercially available single to be considered for the chart. Thus, the band's best known songs, such as "Black Hole Sun," were radio hits but didn't make the Hot 100.
  • Frontman Chris Cornell told USA Today the song captures "that super heavy version (of the band) we were finally realizing to its fullest potential about 1991."
  • The song's music video was directed by Brendon Small, the co-creator of American animated television series, Metalocalypse. The clip is the first artist-driven music video to be based on the show and features the Soundgarden members transformed into cartoon avatar-robot controllers patrolling the streets of a post-apocalyptic Seattle fighting alien spaceships and transparent monsters. "I'm a gigantic Soundgarden fan and it was so much fun bringing them into our warped Metalocalypse world," Small told Billboard magazine about making the video.

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