Audioslave - Revelations

Sun 17th Sep, 2006 in Music Reviews

The most important thing to realise about the new Audioslave album is that it does indeed rock.

Never mind that the dull cover art makes it look boring, or that this one, Revelations, is coming just a year after the last one, Out Of Exile, or that Chris Cornell is heading into his mid-forties – Revelations still packs a punch.

Then again, that punch could have been so much better. When you go to pick this up, don’t expect that it will be anything new or original: they’ve already proved with their first two albums (but particularly the first) that there’s nothing more to Audioslave than a bit of Rage grind and a lot of double melody with some Led Zeppelin influences along the way, but even the band don’t sound too excited on Revelations about the album they themselves have put together.

Things kick off with the title track ‘Revelations,’ nice, radio-friendly rock which allows Cornell to flirt (musically of course) with Morello’s big bad-ass riffing, while the lyrics suffer:

‘Such a shame that I wouldn’t know by now
Your revelations
Let me in I don’t want to live without
Your revelations’

Elsewhere the band let loose their political roots, like on ‘Broken City,’ a track about last year’s hurricane in the US and the reactions of the president, and the CD works its way up to some breath-taking closers as it gets near the finish, like ‘Jewel of the Summertime’ and the emotionally powerful and epic ‘Moth,’ which gets something out of Audioslave’s influences that we’ll probably never get again.  Then there are the annoying tracks; like ‘Somedays’ and ‘One and the Same,’ which are made up of a couple of punching bass notes and a cheesy one-liner thrown in your face.

Ups and downs make up Revelations - certainly nothing as good as the title might make you think it is, and nothing to change the world – but a lot better than most of the popular rock you might find sitting in your local CD store. It’s not time to write this supergroup off, but they really need something really, well, fiery, to save themselves from just seeming like a routine – oh, and ‘Original Fire,’ which fans have pointed out may be a reference to the band (‘The original fire has died and gone / But the riot inside moves on’) will look a lot cooler than it really is.  See you next year, guys.