AUDIOSLAVE - Out Of Exile

Abandoned nearly five years ago by Zack De La Rocha, the remaining three quarters of Rage Against The Machine launched a new project in 2002, Audioslave, bringing in the voice of Soundgarden's Chris Cornell. Their self-titled debut had shown the band members ready to cash in on the reputation they'd built, settling old scores with the past. It was a flat, tepid record, its songs feeling like less than anonymous filler, seemingly written on the spot at packaging time, with Morello trying to liven things up with a few effects while Cornell supplied the vocals. Pushed along by the hype machine and a couple of solid singles (basically the only two genuinely worthwhile tracks in the whole mess), the "project" caught on and sold beyond expectations.

Audioslave thus pressed on, returning three years later with a new record, "Out of Exile". The first thing that strikes the ear is the greater care taken with the songs (however slight their actual substance) and a more cohesive sound. None of the twelve tracks offer anything unexpected, and that's precisely where the greatest care was invested: making a record that pleases the right people and turns a profit. Essentially, they took a certain number of ballads straight from the hard-rocker-with-his-heart-on-his-sleeve playbook and a certain number of Led Zeppelin riffs, played it all, tidied it up, stuck Morello off in a corner halfway through each track to noodle out solos (whether effects-laden or purely self-indulgent), and the job was done.

Let's be clear from the outset: had a good record come out of it, we wouldn't have cared one bit that not a single note of it hadn't already been played to death in decades past, and we'd have talked about a return to rock's roots and essence, etcetera etcetera. Had a good record come out of it. "Out of Exile", quite simply, isn't one. And yet the opening track, "Your Time Has Come", despite blatantly plagiarizing Led Zeppelin (what a coincidence), still manages to pull you back in time and draw you in. The same script repeats on "Drown Me Slowly" and "Man or Animal": the only difference is that here the copying, no less obvious than in the first case, bears no fruit.

This isn't a matter of preferring the originals to the copy: it's that whoever did the copying did it badly. Staying with the more up-tempo tracks, it should also be said that "The Worm" changes target: this time they try to capture the alchemy of Black Sabbath, but the result is no better. Among the ballads, worth noting are "Yesterday to Tomorrow", with its glockenspiel arrangement, which lands on a decent hook, and at the opposite end the heartfelt "Heaven's Dead", which is perhaps the weakest track on the record. Variations on the formula come in the form of the power-ballad "Doesn't Remind Me", which draws on a country-tinged melody, and the pop-rock of "Dandelion" — tracks that are hardly outstanding, but at least stand out for being "different".

In the end, "Out of Exile" has just one problem: even without sinking to the lows reached by many tracks on the self-titled "debut", it never manages to deliver any kind of emotion whatsoever.

Everything drifts along in the anonymity of a faded, uninspired copy.

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30/04/2026