Back in the day, Kiss used to put out an album every six months. James Brown and The Beatles did the same. Johnny Cash put out something like 300 albums. Knowing how short our lives are, and how the work is all that we leave behind, sometimes it’s the mortality of things that makes our legacy.

These days we’reused to people taking a decade to write and record 12 new songs. Guns N Roses have left it 15 years now. Kraftwerk only broke radio silence after an astonishing 17 years for the followup (and, in the 17 years before that last album, they managed ten records). So for a band to release an album a year after the preceeding one is astonishing in todays climate.

The hyperaccelerated culture sees bands release more and less. More bands, less individual releases. And with the age of panic, is there time ot absorb what is happeninga round us? Everything happens with an age that what’s going to happen next is more important, that we’re racing through the here and now at the expense of the events around us. We’re always looking forward, but we’re not.

And so Audioslave return with a hasty follow up to last years “Out OF Exile”. The ink has barely dried on the last album, before this one races out of the gates. One suspects that an awful lot of this material reflects the long gestation period for “Out Of Exile” : there’s little in the way of progression sonically or stylistically – it’s still a fluid amalgam of balls out alt.metal and chest beating, hair-down-in-a-fliptop-Cadillac-doing-70-on-Route-66-rock.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Though the fierce, clipped precision of Rage Against The Machine has been tempered into an altogether more relaxed, epic vista. The fire still burns : but now it’s been brought under control and no longer eats its way through everything in its path.

Original songs kind of merge into one mass distinguishable only by the fact that it goes quiet at the end : and despite what this implies, “Revelations” is a cohesive collection of high quality material. Cornell’s vocals still soar like some kind of tattooed, seventies eagle. “One Of The Same” offers a previously unknown sleazy, Shaft-style undergroove to the rock, whilst occasionally the material sounds a little sparse (“Original Fire” is a one dimensional stomp).

“Revelations” is an excellent, traditional rock album : just like they used to make ‘em in the Golden Age Of US Arena Rock 1969-1976, with a side order of modern angst.

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