The rap-rock and rap-metal hybrid Rage Against the Machine helped define in the '90s was around before the Los Angeles quartet released its debut album in But no other band made more of its time, and the short-lived creative spark of the tiresome genre, than Rage Against the Machine, who were fronted by a black guitarist and a singer with Mexican heritage.
It's not too surprising with these two elements in place that the band would become one of the most revolutionary-minded of the era. During their brief period together -- four albums in nine years, one of them a throwaway covers LP -- they managed to make alt-rock more exciting just as Nirvana and Pearl Jam copycats were infiltrating playlists with smoothed-over grunge riffs. Rage Against the Machine had riffs too -- some borrowed from Jimi Hendrix , some from Led Zeppelin -- but they also had a truly inventive guitarist in Tom Morello, who could make his instrument sound like a scratching turntable.
That gave Rage an edge over their contemporaries. Singer Zack de la Rocha helped too. Few rappers, or singers for that matter, were as impassioned. One listen to the cringeworthy Take Me Higher , which mainly consists of Chuck D grumbling about drones and sounding like a miffed grandad shooing some kids off his lawn, should be enough to convince you that this is a career low point for everyone involved. Conceived by the guitarist in the aftermath of the messy end of Audioslave, and inspired by his love of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen , The Nightwatchman project has spawned three full length albums and an EP since A curio for hardened Morello fans only.
By , the fire that had driven Audioslave appeared to be all but extinguished. Almost immediately after Revelations was completed, vocalist Chris Cornell went solo and recorded the song You Know My Name for the James Bond film Casino Royale, and Morello was quickly working on The Nightwatchmen rather than tour the record, and inevitable split was confirmed soon after.
Listening to Revelations today you can hear why. The band had clearly run out of steam by this point, rehashing ideas from previous records but with far less satisfying results. Which, when you consider the people involved, feels like an even bigger crime. For his first solo album, Morello took the magpie-like approach of trying to incorporate as many artists and genres into one album as he possibly could.
Roping in members of bands as diverse as Mumford And Sons and Wu Tang Clan, it was always going to be difficult to make The Atlas Underground feel like a coherent piece, and the record is certainly patchy. When it is good, it is well worth your time: the collaborations with rapper K.
But with a running time of nearly an hour this is a record that really starts to become an endurance test towards its unremarkable end. Zack de la Rocha has kept a much lower solo profile than his Rage bandmates.
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