by Clare O'Brien

Created on: January 13, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

Audioslave
Revelations
Columbia/Sony BMG

Audioslave might reasonably be forgiven for imagining a conspiracy amongst the world's press to put an end to them. Dogged by breakup rumours since their inception and bedevilled by comparisons to their members' old bands, they've cheerfully soldiered through a slew of live dates around the world which have established them in the minds of fans, if not of journalists, as a permanent musical force.

They also produced a thoughtful and exploratory sophomore album in 2005's Out of Exile. Although often exciting and surprising it felt transitional, as thought the band were hunting down a new aesthetic which would finally lay the ghosts of Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine. It's frequently the "difficult" third album that sets the benchmark for a band's mature work think Radiohead's OK Computer, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy.

So it is with Revelations, which establishes Audioslave's coherence through a brutally succinct reinterpretation of sounds that probably shaped the band's own musical vocabulary. Lead-off single Original Fire recalls rock's glory days over a hard, funky Motown stomp, but strip away the sonic shell and what's left inside sounds like a Springsteen Nebraska-era mood-piece.

The other eleven tracks run the gamut of emotional fuel from anger (Revelations) to agony (Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye), but the ferocious musical assault seldom lets up. Tracks such as Somedays and Jewel Of The Summertime are among the heaviest tracks the band has recorded, although this is very far from mindless riffing. The language Audioslave speak here is elastically blues-based, recalling classic 70s rock bands like Free and Led Zeppelin although the Commerford/Wilk rhythm section can get unexpectedly funky and Tom Morello's trademark atonality often veers towards violence.

There's an old-school soul influence, too, especially in Chris Cornell's vocal for the bitter One And The Same. With Atlanta-based producer Brendan O'Brien at the helm in place of Rick Rubin, Revelations's sound is more cohesive, with layered vocals and tightly-controlled arrangements contributing to the music's determined power and impact.

Lyrically the album is more sinister than its predecessor, embracing both the personal and the political in a dystopian view of dark days ahead. Although Wide Awake is a frank indictment of US government inaction post-Katrina, songs such as Broken City and Sound Of A Gun touch upon the kind of fears we all have for the future in an increasingly brutal culture. It's not all gloom, though; in Moth, ex-addict Cornell paints a realistic picture of recovery and Until We Fall cautiously intimates that some scars can heal.

With solo albums from both Morello and Cornell in the offing and a new Audioslave live tour slated for 2007, it might be a while before this band show us where they go from here. If they can hang onto their nerve they could now claim, like Led Zeppelin before them, the kind of stature that might finally eclipse their own troubled past.

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