Soundgarden – Telephantasm

Serving as something of a commercial first, this career retrospective from Seattle's ageing quartet will be bundled with the next Guitar Hero games package. With Soundgarden steadily acquiring one of the most heinously un-cool reputations in rock - thanks largely to Chris Cornell's narcissistic solo efforts and the clunky, dunderheided Zeppelinery of Audioslave - presumably the hope is that some vitality might return to their recently-risen corpse.

Whilst the multi-disc, limited edition version of the set contains a number of worthy rarities, this single disc boasts a nicely remastered version of their debut Sub Pop single and a powerful unreleased Badmotorfinger outtake (Black Rain) yet is rendered otherwise peripheral by 1997's more comprehensive A-Sides.

Though comprised of some fundamentally great songs, Telephantasm inexplicably omits bona fide classics like The Day I Tried To Live. Combined with the fact that there is no better introduction to Soundgarden than their insurmountably impressive 1994 opus Superunknown, the exercise feels a little redundant. [Austin Tasseltine]