*** 1/2TEMPLE OF THE DOG�Temple of the...

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TEMPLE OF THE DOG

“Temple of the Dog�

A&M;

You know about New Orleans funerals: high-stepping, brass-spiked send-offs drumming the departed into the hereafter with joyful rhythms and mournful harmony. Well, here’s a Northwestern long-haired youth graveside service, a hard-rock requiem that becomes a self-examination as the survivors both pay their respects and purge their confusion.

Temple of the Dog is a one-time collaboration by six members of the tight-knit Seattle rock community honoring singer Andrew Wood, who died of a drug overdose last year. Guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament of his group Mother Love Bone play prominent roles, but with all due respect to the five instrumentalists’ intense, empathic playing, this is Chris Cornell’s show.

Soundgarden’s singer turns in a revelatory vocal performance, locating a vein of urgency and warmth in the steeliness of his plangent, preternaturally high voice. When he soars even higher than high without losing a trace of clarity and control near the end of “Say Hello to Heaven,� he demonstrates how to summon and free the most difficult emotions.

That opening valediction rings with the timeless beauty and grit of a Jimi Hendrix-Lynyrd Skynyrd merger, and it sets the album’s blues-rock, celestial-metal tone. The songs are in turn sweet, funny, bleak and chilling, and despite the gripping, sustained concentration, it all comes out effortlessly.

Albums are rated on a scale of one asterisk (poor) to five (a classic).