The "Audioslave" (album) Appreciation Thread

DOSW
DOSW Posts: 2,012
edited September 2007 in Other Music
Honestly, I've been listening Audioslave's debut album for years and it's never gotten old. It's just a great rock record, period. It's weird because the critics seem to pan this album the most, even though I think it's infinitely better then their other two. The perfect record for any mood.... angry, happy, whatever... just blast it and it'll just feel right. Cochise alone is worth the price of admission... one of my favorite 'loud' songs ever. There are a FEW duds, yeah, but there are a lot of hidden gems too (Exploder is one of their best).

Great, great album. There's a lot of Cornell talk on here, but it seems like there's never enough love for this album.

Let's hear it people!
It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win
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Comments

  • TVVNCYBRAPJ
    TVVNCYBRAPJ Posts: 84
    I feel the same way, I wish Audioslave's other two albums were half as good as their debut
    4/23/03 - Champaign, IL
    5/16/06 - Chicago, IL
    8/23/09 - Chicago, IL
    5/4/10 - St Louis, MO

    ...tickle my nausea...
  • clarefromscotland
    clarefromscotland Posts: 154
    Funny, I felt the debut was the weakest of the three overall, although it did have some great tracks ;o) Sounded like RATM with CC improvising over the top, and I never really liked RATM. I preferred it when they started to integrate better and play real songs.
    www.myspace.com/clareobrienwright
    www.chriscornell.org.uk
  • Mike_Muse_Rage
    Mike_Muse_Rage Posts: 677
    I always find it difficult to decide which of the three Audioslave albums is my favourite. Each is very special in their own way, but self-titled is the heaviest and most raw. Bring Em Back Alive is a stupidly underrated song.
  • darthvedder88
    darthvedder88 Posts: 1,023
    clarefromscotland wrote:
    Funny, I felt the debut was the weakest of the three overall, although it did have some great tracks ;o) Sounded like RATM with CC improvising over the top, and I never really liked RATM. I preferred it when they started to integrate better and play real songs.

    I agree, their debut was the weakest. However, there were some great tracks. Shadow on the Sun, The Last Remaining Light, Show Me How to Live, and Light My Way were amazing.

    I think Revelations may have been the best. Shame they never toured to support the album.
    "Darth Vader would say 'Impressive'."

    -Eddie Vedder

    6/24/06 Cincinatti, Ohio
    6/14/08 Manchester, Tennessee
  • DOSW
    DOSW Posts: 2,012
    Mike_Muse_Rage wrote:
    I always find it difficult to decide which of the three Audioslave albums is my favourite. Each is very special in their own way, but self-titled is the heaviest and most raw. Bring Em Back Alive is a stupidly underrated song.

    "I AM A VIRUS!"

    Great song, definitely.
    It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win
  • snipes824
    snipes824 Posts: 870
    darthvedder88 wrote:
    I agree, their debut was the weakest. However, there were some great tracks. Shadow on the Sun, The Last Remaining Light, Show Me How to Live, and Light My Way were amazing.

    I think Revelations may have been the best. Shame they never toured to support the album.
    revelations better than audioslave? no no no. audioslave self titled is one of my favorite rock records ever. i agree with DOSW.
  • boroff89
    boroff89 Posts: 786
    I'd rank them 1) Out of Exile 2) Self-Titled 3) Revelations. Revelations is an atrocious album. I doubt I will ever listen to it again. The self-titled album has its moments but is inconsistent. Out of Exile is more cohesive and has songs like Dandelion and Heaven's Dead that I feel represent some of Cornell's best songwriting. More in the mold of the direction he was heading on Euphoria Morning. Now we have the travesty of an album that is Carry On. As of now, it is the only album from this year that I have listened to which has earned by "flaming piece of shit" label.
    It makes much more sense to live in the present tense.
  • clarefromscotland
    clarefromscotland Posts: 154
    boroff89 wrote:
    I'd rank them 1) Out of Exile 2) Self-Titled 3) Revelations. Revelations is an atrocious album. I doubt I will ever listen to it again. The self-titled album has its moments but is inconsistent. Out of Exile is more cohesive and has songs like Dandelion and Heaven's Dead that I feel represent some of Cornell's best songwriting. More in the mold of the direction he was heading on Euphoria Morning. Now we have the travesty of an album that is Carry On. As of now, it is the only album from this year that I have listened to which has earned by "flaming piece of shit" label.

    It always amuses me to be reminded how utterly subjective this whole art-appreciation thing is, lol. In contrast to the above, I don't feel OOE and EM have much in common at all, either musically or in terms of mood and content. And although OOE is probably my favourite AS album, I think Revelations (aside from some clunkers like Until We Fall, and that sounds great solo acoustic - it's the RATM crew that can't handle it) is a much more consistent and integrated album than the debut.

    And for me, Carry On has some wonderfully subtle and accessible songwriting. It's rare for a writer to combine those two attributes. There's also some of his best and strangest lyric writing ever in "Disappearing Act", "Silence The Voices" and "Killing Birds".
    www.myspace.com/clareobrienwright
    www.chriscornell.org.uk
  • Oh, Jimmy
    Oh, Jimmy Posts: 957
    It's fairly solid, but the second disc does sound more like a real band. The first album was riff after riff. The second album was lots of chordy type stuff. Plus Tom Morello busts out the chops.

    Revelations is easily the worst album by musicians that I thought I could trust to make good music.
  • reversedarwinism
    reversedarwinism Posts: 1,151
    1) OOE
    2) Revalations
    3) AS

    I love all three though. AS is a great album, just don't appreciate it as much as the other two.
    bombs, dropping down, please forgive our hometown
  • rhcpjam1029
    rhcpjam1029 Posts: 1,982
    Appreciate.
    Beavis: All my friends are brown and red? What does that mean?
    Butthead: It means that his friends are like turds and that they like suck.
    Beavis: Heh heh. Oh yeah. Yeah! Get those spoons out of my face before I shove them up your butt!
    Butthead: Huh huh.
  • DOSW
    DOSW Posts: 2,012
    This is the kind of awesome SG-like songwriting that Chris has gotten away from lately, which is a big reason why the quality of his music has gone WAY down:


    Met a man locked away
    For things he hadn't done
    Innocence on a ball and chain
    Never feel the sun
    A grin on his face
    Roses in his hands
    But when he smiled at me
    I could understand

    If you're free you'll never see the walls
    If your head is clear you'll never freefall
    If you're right you'll never fear the wrong
    If your head is high you'll never fear at all

    There was a daughter of a man
    Took his life too young
    She swore she'd never do those things
    Then did just what he'd done
    And a boy who's gone insane
    Heard voices in his head
    No one knows what they say
    Now his mothers dead

    If you're free you'll never see the walls
    If your head is clear youll never freefall
    If you're right you never fear the wrong
    If your head is high you'll never fear at all

    There was a man who had a face
    That looked alot like me
    I saw him in the mirror and I fought him in the street
    And when he turned away I shot him in the head
    Then I came to realize I had killed myself

    If you're free you'll never see the walls
    If your head is clear you'll never freefall
    If you're right you'll never fear the wrong
    If your head is high you'll never fear
    It's a town full of losers and I'm pulling out of here to win
  • audiodave
    audiodave Posts: 1,623
    Audioslave's self titled album really is great, and i've loved it for years. I don't really think it sounds like RATM with Chris over the top, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Yes it is the heavist and the rawest, but the songs on it are still pretty diverse.

    I don't listen to Out Of Exile ever really, but Revelations has really started to grow on me recently. I listened to it about once when I got it, then forgot about it. Picked it up again fairly recently, and there are some great tunes on there. I think Original Fire is possibly the worst on the album for me, and I have no idea why it was a single. I love Revelations, One And The Same, and Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye...and Moth is one of the best Audioslave songs. I really enjoy it as an album now.

    I didn't like Carry On much to start with either, but I forced myself to listen to it as I was going to see Chris Cornell. It does have some really good songs on it though. I really like No Such Thing, and even like Arms Around Your Love, despite it being very poppy, it is a good song. Silence The Voices is a great song, as is She'll Never Be Your Man, and I think I really like Killing Birds..but sometimes i'm not sure.
    ~AKA Dave-of-the-dead~

    I don't wanna think, I wanna feel

    Dublin 23/08/06 Lisbon I 04/09/06 Lisbon II 05/09/06 Paris 11/09/06 Verona 16/09/06

    London 18/06/07 Dusseldorf 21/06/07 Copenhagen 26/06/07 Nijmegen 28/06/07
  • audiodave
    audiodave Posts: 1,623
    DOSW wrote:
    which is a big reason why the quality of his music has gone WAY down:

    In your opinion. I don't think the quality of his music has gone down that much, it's just very different thesedays and a lot of people don't seem to be able to handle the change. But that's just MY opinion.
    ~AKA Dave-of-the-dead~

    I don't wanna think, I wanna feel

    Dublin 23/08/06 Lisbon I 04/09/06 Lisbon II 05/09/06 Paris 11/09/06 Verona 16/09/06

    London 18/06/07 Dusseldorf 21/06/07 Copenhagen 26/06/07 Nijmegen 28/06/07
  • dana_b
    dana_b Posts: 141
    It's really interesting to hear the different opinions on this. It just goes to show that there is no right or wrong- just what makes you happy.
    Based on which albums I play the most it would be 1) self titled 2) Revelatons 3) OOE. I see that many of you dislike Revelations but for me, those last three songs, in a row, just blow me away! Personally i thought OOE was a miss. When I heard 'Be Yourself" for the first time, I thought "what the hell is this crap?" There were some keepers on the album, but much of it bored me. The third album brought back the rawness and power but alas, it was not meant to be...
  • facepollution
    facepollution Posts: 6,834
    I think the first album was great, even if parts of it did sound like Chris singing over the top of Rage riffs, it was still a very solid album, and at certain points I think it really came together. Shadow On The Sun is an obvious example of this, and easily ranks among anything any of them have produced. OOE wasn't a bad record, and again featured some really good stuff like #1 Zero. Revelations has some very good stuff on it, in fact I think Wide Awake is probably the best song they produced as a band, but the record does have a few clunkers, like Somedays, Broken City etc.

    As far as Carry On is concerned, my views have been changing on it lately. As I'm sure some of you remember when it came out, I was less than impressed with it. But having listened to the odd bits here and there lately, I am starting to warm up to it. The biggest problem for me is that it lacks identity. Where Euphoria Morning was shot through with an unmistakable melancholy, which made the record feel cohesive, Carry On flirts with so many different tempos and genres, that it feels all over the place. Yet listening to the individual songs, I really find it hard to pin-point what it is I don't like. Silence The Voices, Safe And Sound, Disappearing Act, Ghosts, Killing Birds - all very good songs, and very well written.

    In all honestly I think the album, more than anything, was just rushed. For a start if he had held back a few months his voice would have been way better, as has been made abundantly clear on the subsequent tours. And perhaps he could have decided if he wanted to make a chirpy upbeat pop rock album, a harder rocking album, or a more acoustic based record - rather than just throwing all his ideas together. Either way, I think his next album will probably be a lot better. I think through touring and revisiting his whole back catalogue, he will hopefully find some idea of exactly who he is as a solo artist.
  • clarefromscotland
    clarefromscotland Posts: 154
    facepollution wrote:

    In all honestly I think the album, more than anything, was just rushed. For a start if he had held back a few months his voice would have been way better, as has been made abundantly clear on the subsequent tours. And perhaps he could have decided if he wanted to make a chirpy upbeat pop rock album, a harder rocking album, or a more acoustic based record - rather than just throwing all his ideas together. Either way, I think his next album will probably be a lot better. I think through touring and revisiting his whole back catalogue, he will hopefully find some idea of exactly who he is as a solo artist.

    I think there's a lot of truth in what you say. Given the circumstances, Carry On probably was made too quickly - although that isn't always necessarily a bad thing - and I think it's transitional in terms of what he's up to musically. When I interviewed him earlier this year he did say that it was probably a reaction to what he was doing in Audioslave and he also implied that it might take a bit of time to establish a firm identity as a solo artist. I think he meant it would take time for him, as well as time for the public to accept it.

    Also, like many very talented people, he's mercurial. He gets bored with doing the same old things and he wants to experiment. All that makes him vital and alive, even if it doesn't make him predictable, and people's expectations get confused.
    www.myspace.com/clareobrienwright
    www.chriscornell.org.uk
  • Mike_Muse_Rage
    Mike_Muse_Rage Posts: 677
    Carry On is technically the first album Cornell has done on his own so it's bound to be different. When he wrote songs for Soundgarden and Audioslave (not many but a few) he had the rest of the band's input into how they would sound but remained the overall principal songwriter. On Euphoria Morning, at least half of the songs were co-written with the members of Eleven. I believe that Chris works best in a band situation so I really hope he can stick with his current live musicians and go into the studio with them, because, for me, what Carry On was lacking was a band atmosphere. I think, with a bit of tweaking, that album could have been much more than it was.
  • pjtaper
    pjtaper Posts: 3,020
    AUDIOSLAVE IS FUCKING AWESOME!!!
    Chris Cornell is a dick!
  • pjtaper
    pjtaper Posts: 3,020
    dana_b wrote:
    It's really interesting to hear the different opinions on this. It just goes to show that there is no right or wrong- just what makes you happy.
    Based on which albums I play the most it would be 1) self titled 2) Revelatons 3) OOE. I see that many of you dislike Revelations but for me, those last three songs, in a row, just blow me away! Personally i thought OOE was a miss. When I heard 'Be Yourself" for the first time, I thought "what the hell is this crap?" There were some keepers on the album, but much of it bored me. The third album brought back the rawness and power but alas, it was not meant to be...
    REVELATIONS IS MY FAVORITE!!! FAVORITE ALBUM OF 2006! Avocado is #2... that says a lot!

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