My first encounter with the Nightwatchman came last summer when the group (aka Tom Morello) opened for Serj Tankian's solo band in Chicago. It was nice to get a little nap in so I was energized for Serj's set. The open chord patterns all sounded like Intro to Guitar lessons, and the singing wasn't very much better. Luckily, Morello's latest batch of songs sound like he actually wrote them instead of improvising them around a campfire. The material is a lot better, even if the disc still falls short of anything you might expect in seeing the name 'Tom Morello' attached to it. Props to the new band, who go by the name of The Freedom Fighter Orchestra. Go figure.Most of these tracks are generic and boring – "The King of Hell" sounds like Veggie Tales with its hokey/corny/lame chorus of "The devil is not the king of Hell!" but "Whatever It Takes" is old school Tom (meaning it has a riff in it.) While this song is about as listenable as the album gets, and the music really is pretty good, the song would still definitely benefit from a Chris Cornell or a Zach de la Rocha on lead vocals. Both those guys were the perfect attention getters, Chris hovering high above the Audioslave tracks and Zach commanding attention in Rage Against the Machine. If you were looking for the next logical step in the Tom Morello sequence, then don't even bother.
Further, if you're getting sick of generic political tunes, then you can sit this one out as well. At least Rage kept it exciting; this entire disc's worth of mumbling aims for the grit of the early Leonard Cohen albums but comes off incredibly annoying, like E.T. fronting a pro-union folk group. Nowhere is this more evident than on "Rise to Power", with its whispered vocal lines that just ought to be completely avoided. I understand that Morello is trying to go for a new sound after feeling trapped by what was pretty much the exact same guitar trickery in his last two bands (both awesome), but 'quiet' doesn't have to mean 'boring'.
It's just too preachy. We get it. Rally the workers. Unions are good. "There's an old withered dog chained up there / And I saved him / Or maybe he saved me?" Right, yeah, that too. We'll give Tom Morello credit for not referring to himself as a 'one man revolution' this time around, but Zach de la Rocha aged a lot more gracefully, even if he did just more-or-less repeat The Battle of Los Angeles with his latest project One Day as a Lion. That's got nothing to do with the Nightwatchman, but I feel like that may be the most significant point I could make in this review.
Don't Believe Me?
www.myspace.com/thenightwatchman
Recommended If You Like:
Neil Young, early Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash
