To say that the vocalist and songwriter Chris Cornell, who died late Wednesday at 52, possessed one of the most commanding voices in rock is hardly hyperbolic. His impressive range, which could delve into sub-basement registers and hop-skip octaves with an effortless brio, helped define the otherwise hard-to-categorize music of his main project, Soundgarden, and allowed him to test boundaries—of style, of genre, of notes leapt in a single bound.

Soundgarden burst from the mid-’80s Seattle underground with commanding, odd songs that stood apart from their peers—the landing-gear whine at the start of “Hunted Down” doesn’t so much open their first EP, 1987’s Screaming Life, as it announces it, and the songs that follow are spiky and turbulent, although there’s ample room for Cornell’s moans amid the chaos.

The records that followed would hew a little bit more closely to rock’s norm, but that was because they were helping define it; while the manic Screaming Life track “Tears to Forget” would have stuck out on, say, their platinum-selling 1996 album Down on the Upside, connecting it to the latter album’s Mainstream Rock chart-topping sulk “Blow Up the Outside World” isn’t too much of a conceptual stretch. A big part of this was Cornell, whose singular approach to vocals became more controlled over time.

While he could out-yawp late-’80s “Headbangers Ball” denizens like Skid Row’s Sebastian Bach and Bulletboys’ Marq Torien, he didn’t only fly high; depressives’ anthems like the Louder Than Love dirge “I Awake” and the blues-tinged Superunknown track “Fell on Black Days” deploy his upper register strategically, nodding to the near-numbness depicted in their lyrics.

But even Soundgarden’s darkest music was leavened by both wit—calling snippets of backward-masked stomach-churners “665” and “667” on their debut full-length Ultramega OK, which came out during the height of PMRC-inspired Satanic panic, and shouting out the electronic child-amuser known as the See ‘n Say on the head-spinning 1991 track “Searching With My Good Eye Closed”—and a willingness to take chances. They brought 7/4 and 9/8 time signatures to rock and, later, pop radio with the pummeling “Spoonman” and the unnervingly dreamy “Black Hole Sun”; they dove into guitar-nerd territory with the pentatonic scales of “Face Pollution” and got political with the crushing, helpless “New Damage,” which might be the Soundgarden song I’ve had in my head the most for the past four months. “The wreck is going down; get out before you drown,” Cornell pleads on its chorus; in 1991 he told Melody Maker that it was “about how the American people have become unbelievably complacent about the way that the U.S. government is eroding more and more basic human rights.”