Rage Against the Machine - Evil Empire (1996)Release ID: 55
I was very late to discover Rage Against The Machine. I had always assumed that they were not my cup of tea based on the “rap metal” tag & their commercial success however when I finally gave their debut album a few listens I found that they actually had plenty to offer a fan of heavy music. I was impressed with the aggression of the vocal delivery & the tightness of the musicianship while the music came across with much more integrity & heaviness than I expected. This wasn’t merely a commercial pop metal venture. After revisiting the debut album again recently & finding that I liked it even more than my initial experiences I decided to give their later albums a chance to impress me.
“Evil Empire” is a very similar sort of album to the self-titled really. The production is a little different in that it sounds a bit brighter with more of a focus on the high end. The bottom end could do with a bit more emphasis & it detracts a little from the overall heaviness of the music in my opinion. I prefer the production on the debut but it’s not a big deal as it generally sounds pretty good. The song-writing style leans heavily on RATM’s previous output while incorporating subtle tweaks to take things a little further. Tom Morello has stepped up his attempts to make his guitar sound as weird as humanly possible & if that was his goal then he has achieved it pretty comfortably. There seems to be a few hardcore-influenced moments & some more straight up hip hop sections on this album with the band flexing their creative muscles a little further than they did before. The rhythm section is again quite brilliant but the heavier production of the debut was a better platform to showcase their skills in my opinion. Zack de la Rocha’s vocal delivery is again strong although probably not as impressive as on the debut.
The album starts off strongly but then the quality of the song-writing fades a bit towards the middle of the album before picking up again in the second half. I think the stronger tracks tend to be the ones where the band just do what they do & don’t try to get too fancy. “Down Rodeo” is my personal favourite with its strong racial themes while hit single “Bulls On Parade” is also very strong. Unfortunately there seems to have been a quality control issue with some of the other material. I find “Vietnow” to be a bit flat but tracks like “Revolver”, “Snakecharmer”, “Tire Me” & “Year Of Tha Boomerang” are a fair bit weaker than anything we’d heard from the band previously. The song-writing on half of the album is up to the standard we expect but the other half is subpar in my opinion. There’s nothing too horrible but these songs just don’t seem to gel. A song like “Year Of Tha Boomerang” for instance sounds to me like the band couldn’t really pinpoint what direction they wanted to take & it ended up sounding like a bit of a mess.
Rage Against The Machine have taken a very similar approach to “Evil Empire” as they did for their debut but it falls short of its older brother in nearly all areas. There's enough quality to leave me confident that the band still had what it took to record a quality record but they definitely needed to work on their quality control & execution.
