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what an amazing album!!! the opening riff just blows your head off, make sure you turn the volume up to really enjoy it!! fantastically diverse and engaging. for me this album is the real coming together of these amazing songwriters the album sounds focused and delivers in all aspects. highlights are definitly 'revelations' 'shape of things to come' 'original fire' 'one and the same' to be honest i could happily name the enire album!! it's on repeat in my car and i find something new with every listen! this album is a must have without a shadow of a doubt, for me it's there best album! thats my personal opinion but i'll leave that for you to decide.

Rating: 5 out of 5

This is another great album from Audioslave. It is fairly similar to their second album, IE it has some great songs and their unique, excellent style but slightly lacking the power of the first album. Saying that, the songs here are great (and the debut was SO good as a bench mark) that this album easily stands up to repeated listening and is a brilliant album in it's own right. If you're already a fan you can't go wrong and if you're new to Audioslave you'll be getting a top album to start your love affair with this band.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Audioslave might reasonably have been forgiven for imagining a conspiracy amongst the world's press to put an end to them. Dogged by breakup rumours since their inception and bedevilled by comparisons to their members' old bands, they finally splintered back into their component parts early in 2007. Before that, though, they cheerfully soldiered through a slew of live dates around the world which established them in the minds of fans, if not of journalists, as a coherent musical force.

They also produced a thoughtful and exploratory sophomore album in 2005's Out of Exile. Although often exciting and surprising it felt transitional, as thought the band were hunting down a new aesthetic which would finally lay the ghosts of Soundgarden and Rage Against The Machine.

It's a shame that this album turned out to be the band's swan-song - because Revelations establishes Audioslave's coherence through a brutally succinct reinterpretation of sounds that probably shaped the band's own musical vocabulary. Lead-off single "Original Fire" recalls rock's glory days over a hard, funky Motown stomp, but strip away the sonic shell and what's left inside sounds like a Springsteen "Nebraska"-era mood-piece.

The other eleven tracks run the gamut of emotional fuel from anger ("Revelations") to agony ("Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye"), but the ferocious musical assault seldom lets up. Tracks such as "Somedays" and "Jewel Of The Summertime" are among the heaviest tracks the band has recorded, although this is very far from mindless riffing. The language Audioslave speak here is elastically blues-based, recalling classic 70s rock bands like Free and Led Zeppelin - although the Commerford/Wilk rhythm section can get unexpectedly funky and Tom Morello's trademark atonality often veers towards violence.

There's an old-school soul influence, too, especially in Chris Cornell's vocal for the bitter "One And The Same". With Atlanta-based producer Brendan O'Brien at the helm in place of Rick Rubin, Revelations's sound is more cohesive, with layered vocals and tightly-controlled arrangements contributing to the music's determined power and impact.

Lyrically the album is more sinister than its predecessor, embracing both the personal and the political in a dystopian view of dark days ahead. Although "Wide Awake" is a frank indictment of US government inaction post-Katrina, songs such as "Broken City" and "Sound Of A Gun" touch upon the kind of fears we all have for the future in an increasingly brutal culture.

It's not all gloom, though; in "Moth", ex-addict Cornell paints a realistic picture of recovery and "Until We Fall" cautiously intimates that some scars can heal.

Rating: 5 out of 5

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.

Rating: 5 out of 5

I was looking forward to the release of this album after enjoying Audioslaves' first two efforts. I have to say though that this was a big dissapointment for me. There's nothing on this album that really gets me interested. Only the 'Original Fire' track would make it onto my iPod!

Better effort next time please Audioslave.

Rating: 2 out of 5