Two short years ago, limp rap-rock hybrids were poised on the verge of global domination. At the very moment when his country needed him most, the incomparable Zack de la Rocha, patron saint of heavy metal hip-hop, announced his break from musical and political revolutionaries Rage Against The Machine, citing communication breakdowns and newfound faults in the band's decision making process.
Soundgardener Chris Cornell had been cultivating their work from behind the mixing board, an unseen and largely uncredited force in the Rage studio prior to his outright assimilation. The music industry was set abuzz when word began to spread that he had been recruited and might soon be return to the mic. He required a name change to accompany the inevitable stylistic differences that would take shape. The result was an intriguing stylistic juxtaposition of two of the most groundbreaking bands of the 1990s, released last week as the self-titled debut from the newly christened Audioslave.
They have rather pretentiously chosen to bill themselves as a "supergroup." While the band was built from the remnants of what clearly were two of the most important rock bands of the decade, this moniker isn't quite appropriate. For starters, the term brings to mind collaborations in which the best and brightest artists of a generation come together to form a union that is more than the sum of its parts. Bassist Tim Commerford, however, is known more for his oddball antics than for his playing abilities, and drummer Brad Wilk certainly is no superstar either.
Furthermore, Audioslave pretty much is exactly what you'd expect to hear from a blend of Rage and Soundgarden, because the two groups don't mesh terribly well. You probably won't really hear Audioslave in any of the songs; instead, you'll hear bits of Rage in some places and bits of Soundgarden in others. This might just be a listener-manufactured shortcoming resulting from the legendary status of each band, but that doesn't make it any less distracting.
Audioslave is not as experimental as Soundgarden, a fact that seems rather backward and quite unexpected given guitarist Tom Morello's reputation for six-stringed innovation. A sizable number of Soundgarden's songs were rather peripatetic, meandering around enough to make you forget where you started. Rage provides a more monochromatic backdrop for Cornell. That's a welcome change in many ways -- he has one of the best voices to shake up rock music in a very long time, and it deserves to be in the spotlight.
There are a few twists in the formula here, though. One might expect a consistent combination of Cornell vocals lying atop raging metal riffs. However, although the Soundgarden influence is present only through the singer, a good deal of the background music is far too reserved to be drawn from RATM's bag of tricks. While likening it to Soundgarden's instrumental backing is both inaccurate and predictable, this absence of RATM techniques clearly is Cornell's doing, because the other band members all hail from the same shared background.
In addition, Cornell clearly is driven harder and faster by his new band than by his last. On the whole, the vocals here tend to be more energetic than those he lent to Soundgarden, often struggling to keep up with the other instruments.
Therein lies one of the biggest flaws with the record, and indeed with the entire Audioslave approach. The Rage crew hasn't really changed direction to adapt to their new frontman. While de la Rocha was by no means the sole reason for the former band's success, his presence was absolutely crucial because of the symbiotic manner in which his lyrical delivery and the band's thunderous riffing facilitated one another. With Rage, the repetitive din of distorted instruments was constantly punctuated by the piercing starts and stops inherent in a rapped performance. These days, Cornell finds himself in the same situations time after time, but his vocal style consists of gritty wails that stretch one or two syllables over several measures. Now, within the same stretches of time, there just aren't enough changes of flavor to make up for the lack of variety in the instrumental parts, and frequently the music feels a bit forced.
That said, Audioslave's debut is a very good record. It is nowhere near incendiary enough to please Rage fans looking for a replacement, but these boys have made some fine rock here. Surprisingly, many of the best tracks on the album, such as "Like A Stone," "I Am The Highway" and "Getaway Car," are those that slow down and placidly trade distortion for poignancy. The decision to release "Cochise" as the lead single obviously was made by an imbecile -- even when drawing only from the heavier anthemic pieces that could be used to sucker Rage cravers into buying the album, "Gasoline" would have been a far better choice.
Try to keep an eye on Audioslave in the near future. A great deal of artistic growth is evident when the final product is compared to the early demos that were leaked onto the Internet a few months ago, suggesting that even better things may be on the way. Far more entertaining, however, is the prospect of a soap opera or two within the band. Several months before the record was released, Audioslave had already disbanded, dropped out of a major summer tour and then regrouped. Let's hope they've got it in them to stick around this time.
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