Tom Morello’s guitarwork across Rage Against the Machine’s four immortal albums landed a perfect bullseye in the rarefied nexus of radical creativity and rock’n’roll classicism. The elastic wah-wahs in “Bulls on Parade,” the valiant chords in “Know Your Enemy,” the laser beam solo in “Sleep Now in the Fire”—these are generational soundtracks for battering steering wheels and pumping fists. None of the subpar projects Morello did after his Wall Street-crashing rap-rock band initially disbanded—Audioslave, Prophets of Rage, the virtuous yet unmemorable protest folk he released as the Nightwatchman—came close to eclipsing Rage Against the Machine’s incendiary music and incisive political messaging, which was the culmination of four distinct artistic personalities joining forces, not just one or two visionaries directing their hired hands.
Nothing Morello does now can diminish his essential contributions to RATM, and in recent years, he’s taken full advantage of that leeway. In 2018, the guitar god released his debut album under his own name, The Atlas Underground, an atrocious scramble of collaborations with dubstep producers (Knife Party, Bassnectar), radio-rock dweebs (Marcus Mumford, Portugal. The Man), and the rapper K. Flay that elicited visceral reactions like “Why?” and “Who is this for?” and “What did I do to deserve this suffering?” Two more Atlas Undergrounds with equally inscrutable casts of characters—and possibly the tackiest pre-AI cover art of the decade—followed in 2021, proving that without dedicated bandmates to guide him, Morello could consistently write a terrible song with just about anyone.
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It doesn’t feel good to rag on Morello. Inherant hypocrisies of being a self-proclaimed activist who lives in an L.A. mansion aside, his politics have been admirably consistent for all of his public life; he’s a fiercely vocal champion of socialist, anti-racist, anti-war, and pro-Palestinian causes. He’s a likeable presence in a celebrity caste rife with ghoulish sellouts, which is why it’s so disappointing that his new album, Everyone Gets Everything They Want, fails to provide anything that anyone who loves Morello’s classic work would actually want. The tracklist is a confused grab-bag of sanitized blues-rawk, tedious folk poetry, and degraded versions of whatever his featured guest’s own band happens to sound like, whether that’s cockeyed nu-metal (System of Down’s Serj Tankian) or conscious rap-punk (Kneecap).
Everyone Gets Everything They Want is billed as Morello’s “first solo rock album,” which is sort of accurate if you ignore several songs that sound exactly like unreleased Nightwatchman ballads. And five tracks co-written with Morello’s 15-year-old son, Roman. And a lead single, “Everything Burns,” a synthy nu-metal calamity fronted by Beartooth singer Caleb Shomo, that could slot into any of the Atlas Underground atrocities. Otherwise, yes, Morello does sing and play guitar on many of these tunes, including the title track that sounds like Johnny Cash via Shinedown, and also “Soldier in the Army of Love,” a soul-inflected hard-rock pastiche with a cheese-melting blues riff that sounds like it was written to roll out a new Arby’s menu item.
