Audioslave: Out Of Exile : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"To be yourself is all that you can do": Chris Cornell sings that line over and over in "Be Yourself" on Audioslave's second album. It's a simple truth. It's also been hard work for Cornell, once of Soundgarden, and guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk, the former artillery in Rage Against the Machine. On their 2002 debut, Audioslave hammered and hollered more like an impressive sum of familiar parts -- Soundgarden's classic-Seventies fire and Rage's rap-metal futurism - than a step forward. Out of Exile finds the band on the march and closer to a new whole, if not out of the woods. Part of the problem is difference of attack. Cornell arcs and plunges through notes with the growling imprecision of a cornered animal, while Morello, Commerford and Wilk are ferocious pointillists. At times, the four seem to move parallel to each other rather than as one. And in low gear ("The Worm," "Doesn't Remind Me"), Cornell is prone to overemoting, as if to compensate for the uncommon space in the steel-cable web of Morello's guitar and Commerford's heavy-treble bass. But in the firm roll of "Your Time Has Come" and the concentrated surge of the title song, Audioslave recall the stark power of the Sixties British-blues quartet Free: singer and rhythm section in locked momentum, equally in your face. And there is still no one else in modern metal guitar who rips and shrieks like Morello; his lunatic break over the riptide of "Man or Animal" sounds like hip-hop war, two turntables scratching it out to the death.