Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman

Loudness is not everything. Tom Morello ’86, having been a member of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave—two bands that rocked out mightily—has decided to turn it down with his solo project, The Nightwatchman.

The guitar effects may be gone, but the rhetoric remains on “The Fabled City,” Morello’s second album as his highly politicized alter-ego. However, Morello, who was a Gov concentrator during his time at Harvard, apparently didn’t take any electives in poetry. His heart may be in the right place, but that’s hard to discern as this tepid album plays out.

In many ways, the most disappointing thing about “The Fabled City” is that it starts so well. The title track, which opens the album, has a lovely melody and a fantastic bassline, with Morello seeming to relish the simplicity of the arrangement. Second song “Whatever It Takes,” the only track on the album to feature electric guitar, is propelled along by a typical Morello riff as he exhorts us to defy our oppressors (“Don’t let them tie you to the stake / Whatever it takes”). This opening pair doesn’t provide much in the way of lyrical specificity, but both tunes are very well-constructed and they set up Morello nicely to deliver his messages on the later tracks.

Unfortunately, it’s when Morello gets specific that “The Fabled City” falls apart. “Midnight in the City of Destruction” has pretensions towards being a damning indictment of the Bush administration, but its fury is more bizarre than infectious. At one point Morello sings, “I pray that God himself will come and drown the President if the levees break again,” yet he spends much of the song filling space with pointless “la, la, las,” which leads to a rather confused message. Given the complete lack of melody offered by either Morello’s guitar or voice, the song drifts by without being anywhere near as passionate as it wants to be.

Sadly, the album manages to get much worse than this. “The King of Hell” is shockingly bad, coming off as closer to “Flight of the Conchords” than Bob Dylan. “Saint Isabelle” also offers plenty of unwilling comedy. Its chorus, “I will always stand beside you, defend you and mend you, sanctify you,” might have seemed romantic in 13th-century France, but anyone born since then will recognize it as ridiculous.

“Night Falls,” which, along with “Saint Isabelle” is one of the few non-political songs on the album, could be a sweet ballad if its lyrics weren’t so generic and basic.

The opening couplet (“She warned him, warned him not to go / He said I, I’ve got to go”) demonstrates Morello’s complete inability to portray any depth of emotion in his music. The lyrics disappoint throughout the album and on many songs the listener is reduced to cringing in anticipation of another appallingly obvious rhyme.

These songs show the problem with the very idea of a Morello folk album. Rage Against the Machine was one of the most important bands of the 90s, and Morello practically invented the genre of “Nu-metal,” but whatever you think of that movement you cannot say that it was subtle. Simplistic left-wing posturing works much better when coupled with loud, powerhouse riffs, and Zack de la Rocha’s rapping than it does here with Morello’s flat voice and only intermittently engaging instrumentation. The volume may have been turned down, but on “The Fabled City” the failure of the Nightwatchman project rings through loud and clear.

—Chris R. Kingston can be reached at kingston@fas.harvard.edu.