RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
Renegades
Epic

The band broke up on a bad note, with an arrest after an MTV awards show and a final blowout between Tom Morello and Zach de la Rocha, and while both incidents might have been memorable, the same doesn’t apply for their last album, Renegades.

They’ve established themselves as a hyper-political rock band in a music world that is rabidly devoid of other such groups, so an album of covers, especially ones that seem to lack any heart, any confidence, any qualities at all just doesn’t fit with what the band does. Perhaps they’ve double bound themselves, always wanting to do the unconventional, but then by doing something so conventional, they’ve lost their ability to create something truly intriguing.

And perhaps that’s the real failure here: Renegades just isn’t all that interesting.

Sure, the cover of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Renegades of Funk” is an interesting song, driving by its very nature in that typical, tired RATM sort of way, what with de la Rocha screaming and Morello pounding on the guitar, but “Bulls on Parade” was better as far as singles go. Covers of esoterica, well, that isn’t so bad necessarily, but it really isn’t all that good.

As such, there’s a Devo cover, “Beautiful World” which is suspiciously slow, as if the band had ingested depressant after depressant until they were just incapable of doing their usual thing. And while that’s a good thing, there’s a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm” as if somehow that Minnesota crooner hadn’t done enough with that song that RATM could possibly add something.

Not true.

The RATM cover is devoid of the necessary emotion, the necessary feeling, that the solitary figure of Dylan brought to such a lonely song. Arrogance? Nea, this album serves as a way for RATM to give the proverbial big-ups to some of their favorites, but a cover of the Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad”? Not only is that esoteric by its very nature, but perhaps a song from one of Springsteen’s least regarded albums. And the cover isn’t all that good. Neither is the “Kick Out The Jams” cover, nor the “Microphone Fiend” nor the “I’m Housin” one. The Rolling Stones “Street Fighting Man” doesn’t need to be covered.

In fact, none of the covers is particularly good. And while the live cover of “How I Could Just Kill a Man” with Cypress Hill is interesting enough (who knew B. Real could scream along with music rather than just being high out of his skull?), it certainly doesn’t really do anything more than sound like Zach inviting someone on stage to scream with him.

That’s the problem with the Renegades: RATM is incapable of adding anything to an already solid collection of songs. Rage Against the Machine makes these songs just as solid in their extremely typical way, with a hardened Tom Morello grinding away while Zack screams his blurred sort of scream. One can easily get that on any of the band’s collections of original music and as such, this album really isn’t worth the time or money.