Scream showcases a new, seductive sound that's closer to cosmic house than pop or R&B. In places it's teasingly retro, reshaping elements of Floyd-era prog-rock and Moroder art-disco and blending them with Cornell's unique voice to make something completely fresh. Scream is far from throwaway pop. Although it might be wearing party clothes, it's a complex and harrowing listen. Like Soundgarden's mid 90s masterpiece Superunknown, it doesn't yield up its secrets easily.

Influences mentioned by both artist and producer range from Pink Floyd to Marvin Gaye, Peter Gabriel to Justin Timberlake (who guests on one track, Take Me Alive). Scream has become one of the most anticipated albums of the year, as exciting and controversial a departure as David Bowie's Nile Rodgers-produced Let's Dance was back in 1983. "The initial conception and perception of this record was mixing two worlds — rock and hip-hop, or beat-based music with fuzzy guitars," Cornell told MTV in September 2008. "But it really isn't just that at all. It's a mixture of a lot of different influences."

The album is one long piece of music, with one song flowing into the next, rather as they do on Prince's Lovesexy or Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. It has been played live in its entirety at certain special US shows featuring both Chris and Timbaland, and similar shows (which also included older material) in Europe.

Initially the plan was to dispense with track divisions altogether - but Chris made radio edits of some of the songs in order to give the public a taste of the new album and its radical departure in sound. "I just want to have fun with music and do what I'm inspired by and ... if I'm inspired by it, then someone else will be," Chris told Matt Pinfield of New York's 101.9 FM. "If you get into a kind of comfortable corner, where you're doing what you're used to — you're doing what you know how to do — you can get locked in that corner and stuck there and you're done. That's never going to happen to me."

Those long familiar with Chris Cornell's lyric-writing will find much to recognise - the animal imagery involving wolves and snakes, the nightmare mental landscapes, the reflections on time and change. However, there's also a lighter aspect to this album. As with previous solo album Carry On, he also sometimes invents characters and explores other worlds and settings: the manic female speedfreak of Watch Out, the Chandler-esque adventurer of Other Side Of Town.

Opening track part of me has the slightly racy hook line "that bitch ain't a part of me". The notoriously conservative American media chose to bowdlerise the song by bleeping the offending word but the song was released as the first European single from the album on February 13 (see Amazon.de) with all its lyrics intact. It's a frankly commercial pop song with lyrics about a man trying to escape an unwanted romantic entanglement - and the tongue-in-cheek video features line dancers, a bar brawl and champion boxer Wladimir Klitschko!! The single also features several inventive dance remixes. Here's the cover artwork and credits for those who are curious (thanks latty99), and there's a great behind-the-scenes video featuring Cornell, Timbaland and Klitschko.

Lyrically, time could be a companion piece to Carry On's Disappearing Act. It's another look at change and flux, with some quintessential Chris Cornell lyrics which echo his continuing fascination with metaphysical style and wordplay - "the perfect present is no longer the future". The elegant lyrics cohabit with an old-school R&B vibe which recalls some of the best of the genre from the 60s and 70s.

sweet revenge recalls Drawing Flies from Soundgarden's album Badmotorfinger. Like that song, it has a strongly rhythmic vocal - almost a rap - full of anger and disgust, though this time the fury seems directed not at himself, but outwards at those who would seek to drag him down. "Been to hell and come back - I ain't gonna go there again."

Vladimir Klitschko introduces Part Of Me, and Time and Sweet Revenge live, Berlin, Germany, February 2009

get up is a tough-love, no-nonsense look at what it takes to live life and survive it when "you're in a pack of wolves, trying to live alone". Cornell's raw, soulful vocals contrast with a cavalcade of electronic shapes and colours, a kind of electronic zoo in which all kinds of creatures spawn and frolic.

Like the previous album's Silence The Voices, the percussion-led ground zero is a political song dealing with what Chris has called "the second tragedy of 9/11" - the Iraq war. In an interview, Chris compared it specifically to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On - "soul with a socially conscious message". It's critical of the way the government used the terrorist attacks in NYC as "an excuse to do things that have not been good". Ground Zero was memorably used over the opening sequence of the opening episode of US TV's new time-travel cop drama starring Harvey Keitel, Life On Mars.

never far away has a europop sound and a soaring melody...according to Chris, it's "a strange combination of modern pop and hiphop music resonating with a classic rock anthem". Written for Chris's wife Vicky, it deals with the survival of love despite the separations and distractions of life on the road.

photo by Sean Smith, used by permission

take me alive is perhaps the album's centrepiece. With its world music beats, sinuous harmonies and massed harmony vocals (incuding a contribution from Justin Timberlake) its eastern flavour and sinister, oblique lyric recalls everything from Bollywood epics to Led Zeppelin's Kashmir. Longtime Cornell fans will note the reappearance of the snake imagery that so often slithered through Soundgarden songs.

long gone was the first song to be recorded, although Chris later recorded a replacement vocal take and can't remember which one was used on the album. It was first unveiled by American media host Ryan Seacrest on his radio show and via his website. Chris went on to perform the song live with his band on Tonight with Jay Leno on US network TV as well as on tour. It's a tender out-of-love ballad, with lyrics comparable to those Cornell wrote for Audioslave's Getaway Car.

Title track scream is an intimate little look at the way arguments start - between couples, between friends, between anyone. As Chris put it, "we get sort of lost in the arguments and the fights about things that could easily just be talked about and ended." Sonorous, layered vocals from Cornell and spoken word from Timbaland come together over a sputtering beat in a song which is both pleading and compassionate. Scream was featured on September 22 on TV show One Tree Hill and was released as a download single on iTunes the same day. Chris told interviewers it was "one of the last songs I did" for the album and feels it's reminiscent of a Peter Gabriel song. He's played it live out on tour with his band, acoustically as part of an acoustic duo with his guitarist Peter Thorn - and as part of the Timbaland tribute medley at charity TV event Fashion Rocks, in September 2008.

Scream live, Alpine Valley, WI, 16 August 2008 (thanks esther)

Scream ends with what sounds like the clanking trudge of a retreating army before a crazy electronic hornpipe drops us into the murky hell of enemy. The neo-disco stylings turn an already dark song into something truly terrifying - a danse macabre, a relentless ballet of stylised self-hatred. With its stark, excoriating lyrics ("nothing I pay will make it all right, nothing I take will make me sleep at night") it's perhaps the album's most deeply disturbing moment.

Perhaps a thematic companion of Part of Me and Scream, other side of town tells the story of a relationship blighted by non-communication. Its ill-matched couple don't talk, can't compromise, don't understand each other - and their story is punctuated by a ferocious tango beat and growling, staccato vocals from Cornell.

climbing up the walls is a tough, clear-sighted look at the damage we do to ourselves through addiction and self-harm - and the way forward to recovery and healing. "The world won't try to change your mind if you don't change at all."

The much more aggressive watch out is a rock-inflected song full of imagery about speed, cars and transgression, with a Hammond line which crisscrosses the aural spectrum like headlights and lyrics reminiscent of something from the Soundgarden back catalogue - like, maybe, Ty Cobb, Kickstand or even Get On the Snake. Chris played it live with his band on several dates during the Projekt Revolution tour in summer 2008.

Watch Out at Tampa, Florida, 6 August 2008 (thanks jeffgarden)

Finally, two drink minimum was accidentally leaked by a label employee who uploaded the track to the now-defunct social networking site Imeem along with album closer Watch Out. It's a slow blues with keyboards and harmonica, a little reminscent of songs like When I'm Down from Euphoria Morning, or Audioslave's #1 Zero. In his regular website blog, Chris had this to say about the song:

"If someone was smart enough to find "Two Drink Minimum," bravo! It was mastered with the rest of the album and was meant to be a hidden track. I thought I was the only one who got it but obviously I was wrong. It’s amazing to me how hard the record business tries to keep songs from leaking and then puts out "Watch Out," a song three minutes long with an eight minute file and doesn't notice! Oh well. I wrote that song at about 6:00 am to an organ melody played by Jerome Harmon. He's the guy playing the super sick Hammond B3 on it. I sang it when the sun was coming up about 10 feet from the mic. Just screaming it in the room. If you listen closely, you will hear papers rattling. May you all find your bliss "As hope and promise fade." C

In 2009, he told an audience at LA's Hotel Cafe that he didn't lilke the title of the song, which he preferred to call as hope and promise fade (the song's first line).