Rage Against The Machine The Battle Of Los Angeles (2024 Reissue)
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About
“What better place than here? What better time than now?” Rage Against the Machine couldn’t provide a more urgent thesis statement for their third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, which turns 26-years-old. The album depicts the quartet — vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk — at their most viscerally immediate and politically decisive. It’s the sound of four punks from Los Angeles attempting to use their seismic platform to unify their audience in anti-colonial rage. Those two central questions from “Guerrilla Radio” weren’t just rhetorical calls to action; they would eventually signify the band’s political relevance for decades to come, especially as their fight against white supremacy and fascism reaches a new desperate peak over 26 years later. Over and over again, Rage Against the Machine prove that the here and now is worth fighting for.
Though Battle was released an entire year before one of the most consequential presidential elections in US history, the stakes were already high for Rage. As they jumped yet another rung of the ladder with their ruthless second album Evil Empire in 1996, the group’s rap-rock fingerprints started to show up on numerous bands du jour: Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock each capitalized on elements of their powder keg formula and found mainstream attention in the process. Rather than the resistance that RATM had used to their advantage in their punk-addled early days, they were no longer on the fringes of popularity or pioneering their own genre — they were front-and-center fixtures of a rock scene bursting with mainstream potential.
But Rage Against the Machine, as they had on both albums before Battle, refused to sacrifice their creative ambitions and anti-oppression ethos. While producer Brendan O’Brien kept Rage’s sound as faithful and barebones as necessary, Morello in particular takes some intriguing stylistic leaps on Battle. There’s the barnstorming riffs, sure, but there’s also the hair-raising harmonics on the verses of “Voice of the Voiceless,” the brassy, clown-esque tone on the “Guerrilla Radio” solo, the John Carpenter’s “Halloween Theme”-meets-dial tone feedback on the opening of “Ashes in the Fall.” It’s strangely fitting that The Battle of Los Angeles was RATM’s swan song, because they seemingly perfected the RATM formula with it. To say they were ‘firing on all cylinders’ is an understatement; Battle is Rage’s whole arsenal and more. It’s their heaviest record and their most accessible, with some of their sharpest and most prophetic lyrics in their catalogue. — via Consequence
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Label: Epic, Legacy, Sony Music
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Repress, 180g vinyl
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 1999
Genre: Rock
Style: Alternative Rock, Hard Rock, Funk Metal, Conscious
File under: School of Rock
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- Regular price
- $48.00 SGD
- Regular price
-
- Sale price
- $48.00 SGD
- Unit price
- per
Couldn't load pickup availability
About
“What better place than here? What better time than now?” Rage Against the Machine couldn’t provide a more urgent thesis statement for their third album, The Battle of Los Angeles, which turns 26-years-old. The album depicts the quartet — vocalist Zack de la Rocha, guitarist Tom Morello, bassist Tim Commerford, and drummer Brad Wilk — at their most viscerally immediate and politically decisive. It’s the sound of four punks from Los Angeles attempting to use their seismic platform to unify their audience in anti-colonial rage. Those two central questions from “Guerrilla Radio” weren’t just rhetorical calls to action; they would eventually signify the band’s political relevance for decades to come, especially as their fight against white supremacy and fascism reaches a new desperate peak over 26 years later. Over and over again, Rage Against the Machine prove that the here and now is worth fighting for.
Though Battle was released an entire year before one of the most consequential presidential elections in US history, the stakes were already high for Rage. As they jumped yet another rung of the ladder with their ruthless second album Evil Empire in 1996, the group’s rap-rock fingerprints started to show up on numerous bands du jour: Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock each capitalized on elements of their powder keg formula and found mainstream attention in the process. Rather than the resistance that RATM had used to their advantage in their punk-addled early days, they were no longer on the fringes of popularity or pioneering their own genre — they were front-and-center fixtures of a rock scene bursting with mainstream potential.
But Rage Against the Machine, as they had on both albums before Battle, refused to sacrifice their creative ambitions and anti-oppression ethos. While producer Brendan O’Brien kept Rage’s sound as faithful and barebones as necessary, Morello in particular takes some intriguing stylistic leaps on Battle. There’s the barnstorming riffs, sure, but there’s also the hair-raising harmonics on the verses of “Voice of the Voiceless,” the brassy, clown-esque tone on the “Guerrilla Radio” solo, the John Carpenter’s “Halloween Theme”-meets-dial tone feedback on the opening of “Ashes in the Fall.” It’s strangely fitting that The Battle of Los Angeles was RATM’s swan song, because they seemingly perfected the RATM formula with it. To say they were ‘firing on all cylinders’ is an understatement; Battle is Rage’s whole arsenal and more. It’s their heaviest record and their most accessible, with some of their sharpest and most prophetic lyrics in their catalogue. — via Consequence
↓
Label: Epic, Legacy, Sony Music
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Repress, 180g vinyl
Reissued: 2024 / Original Release: 1999
Genre: Rock
Style: Alternative Rock, Hard Rock, Funk Metal, Conscious
File under: School of Rock
⦿
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