Send Them Back!
Audioslave
Out Of Exile
Just because your members have been drawn out of two genre-defining bands does not mean that your new band automatically rocks. French gourmet cuisine and well-made curry are great in separate meals, but would anyone really argue that combining them and stirring them around creates a great feast? Audioslave are boring, end of story. In fact they are frankly blander and less rewarding than an over-cooked but cold roast chicken.
Single ‘Be Yourself’ is so middle- of-the-road that it leaves you wondering whether they would even get a record deal were the members not famous. “Be yourself, it’s all that you can do,” sings Chris Cornell, but you feel that he’s sold himself to the industry and made a song so indistinctive that it could be one of a thousand US AOR bands. Elsewhere on Out of Exile the band attempt to use recycled RATM riffs with Cornell adding his vocal style on the top.
‘Your Time Has Come’ sounds like a Rage Aagainst The Machine cover band auditioning for a vocalist who has turned up to sing with the band by mistake. Make no mistake, Cornell has a great voice, but it just doesn’t fit with this. Further into the record you come across ‘Drown Me Slowly’, which is such a pointless track that it leaves you with a very strong desire to take the title’s advice quite literally.
The sad thing is that this should be one of the best albums of the year, bursting with enough ideas, riffs and vocal hooks to last an eternity. Instead, listening to it you get the impression that Out of Exile has been made because the band want to make a record purely for the sake of it, even though they have no good songs to bring to the plate. It is the sound of a band who are afraid of getting day jobs.
Neil Young once said “it’s better to burn out than fade away,” and Audioslave should really have listened to him.
2nd Jun 2005