Day 25: Audioslave - Self Titled

In my third week of talking about albums (a great art form that is not always recognized the way, say, paining is) I want to try a different tack.

One of the best things about following an artist and hearing new music from them is that you can trace where the artist (or band in this case, the terms will be used interchangeably on this blog) is heading in their thought process or life story. What can be a little confusing about just choosing an album a day to talk about is that you quite possibly have no connection to the artist, and just hearing about a random album by some group you have never heard of probably makes you want to 'change the channel'.

So, for the foreseeable future, I'm going to go through an artist's catalog album by album, in chronological order so that you can get a better sense of what an album is like based on the trajectory of the music. This will only be possible for artists whose whole record collection I own, like today's Audioslave record or the Third Day or U2 catalog. I love Bruce Springsteen, but I don't own all of his albums. It's the same with Bob Dylan and Neil Young. (For those guys I'll probably start with the first album of theirs I own and work my way forward.) But that's an issue for another day. For today and the next few months it's history lesson time.

These being highly political times (the 2012 Presidential election is a mere week and a half away) it's appropriate to start with political provocative band like Audioslave.

Audioslave was three members of high decibel band Rage Against The Machine (everybody but lead 'singer' Zack Del A Rocha) and the lead singer of defunct band Soundgarden Chris Cornell.

Rage Against The Machine was perhaps a little too caustic and broke up because of infighting. Three of the members considered soldering on, so they were put together with Chris Cornell by uber producer Rick Rubin. They chose (unfortunately) the dumbest name in recent rock history. My votes for worse name of all time is "Puddle Of Mud" and "Moby Grape"

The resulting album has a number of great songs with crazy guitarist Tom Morrello's signature wacky sounds all over the place and the compelling, howling vocals of Cornell. Lead single "Cochise" (named after an native American warrior chief who fought against American imperialism, no coincidence there) rocks with abandon. "Like A Stone" builds fantastically over strummed acoustic guitars (a new thing for Morrello) and was a song my high school students loved to sing along to. "Show Me How To Live" was interesting, existential poetry that hinted at Christian musings by Cornell. "I Am The Highway" burns like a trip through the desert and "Light My Way" is another prayer song of deliverance.

The lyrics occasionally stumble (Cornell was trying to be distinctly different from Del La Rocha) but the music delivers in spades.

3.5 stars