1. Your Time Has Come
2. Out Of Exile
3. Be Yourself
4. Doesn’t Remind Me
5. Drown Me Slowly
6. Heavens Dead
7. The Worm
8. Man Or Animal
9. Yesterday To Tomorrow
10. Dandelion
11. #1 Zero
12. The Curse
I remember falling asleep one night when I was living in New York City. I had crashed while watching something on MTV. Something woke me up in the middle of the night. It sounded like I was in the Vietnamese jungle and the Air Cav was swooping in overhead. It was the first time I’d heard “Cochise”, and I went from a sound slumber to full alertness in one second. After teases and on-again, off-again rumors, finally Audioslave had arrived, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the album.
Imagine my disappointment when I finally bought Audioslave. It was a good concept with flashes of brilliance. But, in the end, it still felt like Chris Cornell singing over some Rage Against the Machine tracks. It just didn’t feel integrated. When I got the opportunity to listen to the new album, I was a bit apprehensive. But I needn’t have worried. This time around, Audioslave is a full-fledged band, and show that to great effect on their new album, Out of Time.
One of the major issues I had with the first album was the fact that Tom Morello, one of the best, most inventive guitarists around, still played as if he was crafting sonic assaults for Zach de la Rocha’s start-a-riot cadence. This time around, his guitar work does a much better job of supporting and supplementing Chris Cornell’s vocals. The first track on the album, “Your Time Has come”, showcases this perfectly, as Chris and Tom mesh perfectly to create a hard-driving, foot-stomping opener, ably backed by arguably the best rhythm section in the business, bassist Tom C. and drummer Brad Wilk.
There’s still the experimental, out-of-left-field Tom on this album, as witnessed by his solos on “Drown Me Slowly”, but the structure of the songs on this album are more cohesive. This is definitely an album leaning more to the Soundgarden influence in the band, hard-rocking anthems interlaced with mellower fare, like the melancholy “Heaven’s Dead”. And you’ll definitely have flashbacks to Superunknown when “The Worm” comes on, with its sinewy, slithering guitar curling through the fat rhythm laid down by Brad and Tom. That’s not to say there’s not a bit of Rage still alive and kicking. “Man or Animal” sounds like something straight from the Battle of Los Angeles sessions. But the music is much more suited to Chris this time around.
There’s no “Cochise” on this album, nothing that just grabs you by the balls and refuses to let go. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is much more of an album, with a lineup of solid tracks, as opposed to the first album, which was really two great songs (“Cochise” and “Like a Stone”) surrounded by promising tracks that never quite lived up to their promise. Audioslave felt like Chris fitting in lyrics to preexisting RATM tracks. With Out of Exile, Audioslave is no longer a supergroup, but a great band in their own right.
