Few of the bands to survive the collapse of alt-rock have held as much enduring appeal as Rage Against The Machine. For the seven years they were at the top of the pile of bands getting talked about, dissected and carried around on the shoulders of politically-aware hard rock and hip-hop aficionados, RATM did more than just win the hearts and ears of a lot of people, they created a mythos that was bigger than the music they made. That’s why when the group called it quits, speculation abounded about who would end up where and if the individual members of the band would amount to anything apart from each other.
It took eight years and a mountain of one-off Rage shows, aborted projects, discarded sessions and speculation about what he might have up his sleeve (if anything), but singer Zack de la Rocha has finally resurfaced, and one listen to One Day As A Lion illustrates that what he’s got is pretty much exactly what every Rage Against The Machine fan thought he had.
Joining forces with former Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore, de la Rocha lashes back immediately with vintage keyboards and drums blazing along with the emcee’s trademark vocal flamethrower searing the cognitive functions of listeners with a microphone. In a lot of ways, the return comes on as if de la Rocha never left; on songs including “Wild International,” “Last Letter” and the title track, the emcee sounds a series of calls to arms with the same ease and grace he had with Rage and plays off of a hard wall of drums that makes you want to believe that change is possible for the ones bold enough to make it.
On the instrumental side, the closest comparative effort to have been released by either of these band members would be when Rage veered to the hip-hop end of their sound with Evil Empire, but even that comparison is largely superficial. The instrumentation on One Day As A Lion is consistently lean and completely avoids any semblance of the rockist bombast that guitarist Tom Morello injected in favor of more droning passages that still somehow keep the energy up, but do so by adding calm-like-a-bomb tension rather than mega-Zeppelin riffs. As a result of that, the onus falls squarely on Theodore to provide an explosion after de la Rocha lights the fuse and while that does happen here, it isn’t the sort of blast listeners might be expecting; more like a theatrical and concussive implication than a cinematic and obvious scorcher.
On the critical side, de la Rocha is a one-trick pony from an emotional standpoint. He’s got rage and biting criticism nailed—he always has—but trying to venture outside of that zone only yields dubious results. The perfect example of that rests in “Ocean View” when he tries to carry a tune. It is the weakest sound on this record and, honestly, we can only hope it doesn’t happen too many more times henceforth but, when stacked against the rest of the material, is permissible.
There’s no doubt that, after so long (not quite as long as Axl Rose, but very close), there are still plenty of skeptical people out there that remember Rage and figure—with so much time gone—hope might be the only thing that propels album sales and kudos for One Day As A Lion. That’s not an unreasonable concern, but one listen to this record will show that Zack de la Rocha hasn’t lost a step with time, hasn’t lost a single ember of the fire that has always compelled him, and has successfully raged against the dying of the light.
Artist:
www.onedayasalion.org
myspace.com/onedayasalion
Album:
One Day As a Lion is out now. Buy it on Amazon.
