2006年 Oct 15日 Sunday, 9:50

Audioslave has never been able to escape its roots. Critics have repeatedly taken issue with their first two albums, complaining that they sounded more like Rage Against the Machine or Soundgarden. They had a point. Both Audioslave’s self-titled debut and 2005’s Out Of Exile never seemed to develop a unique sound. Despite this acknowledge failing, 2006’s Revelations only takes small steps towards solving this problem. However, sound problems aside, Revelations is likely Audioslave’s most even offering to date.

The biggest problem with Revelations is that the band is still unable to escape their roots. Many songs sound remarkably similar the bands forerunners, Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden. The intro to “One And The Same” sounds exactly like an outtake from a Rage song, and then the rest of the song sounds like Soundgarden. The Rage influence is clearly apparent on other songs such as “Sound of a Gun” and “Somedays” while Soundgarden can be heard on “Jewel of the Summertime” and other songs are distinct mixes of the two bands. Only in a few instances does the album take on a sound unique to Audioslave. The single “Original Fire” and “Broken City" are most obviously departures from Rage or Soundgarden. Unfortunately, while “Original Fire” and “Broken City” show a lot of potential to developing a new sound, whatever steps have been taken to developing a new sound are small at best.

Another problem that has plagued Audioslave has been how uneven their past two releases were. Both Audioslave and Out of Exile had truly outstanding songs, but they also had several songs that almost any listener was guaranteed to skip over. For every “Like A Stone” or “Your Time Has Come” there was an unbearably bad song such as “Drown Me Slowly.” Out Of Exile particularly suffered from this problem with a lot of weaker songs bringing down its stronger work. Revelations makes a marked improvement on this problem. Most of the songs are good and its possible to listen to almost the whole album without feeling an impulse to hit the skip button. The downside is that, even as the album is, it lacks genuinely great songs (with the exception of “Original Fire”) and falls short of the bar set by their previous hits. Thus, while Revelations avoids the lows of the previous albums, but almost never reaches their heights.

Revelations makes some promising improvements over Audioslave’s previous releases, but the improvements are too small to make enough of a difference. On one hand it isn’t surprising; Revelations was released a little over a year after Out Of Exile. A few extra months working on the album might have yielded their best album. Instead, the short time between releases seems to have hindered Audioslave from fleshing out a unique sound and prevented them from matching some of the hits of their previous work. Yet, negatives aside Revelations is Audioslave’s most balanced work and is worth checking out if you are a fan of the band.

Grade: B-

The band delivers exactly what’s expected in terms of sound, changing only slightly from before.

- Originally published in Franklin and Marshall College newspaper, The College Reporter on October 2, 2006, which is located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.