‘Drawbar’: Tom Morello’s most disappointing guitar performance
Any guitarist is going to want to create their own voice on their instrument. As much as people might like to quote their favourite guitarists, it’s always up to you to find out what that six-string can do once you have it in your hands, and someone like Tom Morello has been making a blueprint for where the instrument can go for generations to come. But it’s not like Morello knocked it out of the park every single time he played on a track.
Granted, people will always find Morello’s approach an acquired taste. Compared to every other guitar hero that walks the Earth, Morello is almost an anti-hero in many respects, always looking for found sounds that people wouldn’t have bothered working on for more than a second when they were setting up. It’s hard to define what he does, but you can also hear him when he comes in on any song.
Because throughout his career, Morello has prided himself on making things feel weird. Audioslave might have given him an outlet to be a traditional guitar player in the same vein as his heroes, but when working with Rage Against the Machine, it’s impossible to forget any of the effects that he used on a song, like the DJ-scratching solo in the middle of ‘Bulls on Parade’ or the strange otherworldly sounds he gets out of his guitar at the beginning of the tune ‘Ashes in the Fall’.
But if someone has that unique a voice on guitar, there comes a point where everyone wants to have a piece of that on their album. While he doesn’t have the same session pedigree as someone like Slash, Morello has developed a reputation for being one of the finest sidemen when the time calls for it, whether that’s working with hip-hop legends like Run-DMC or contributing a whammy solo to one of Bruce Springsteen’s tunes.
So, really, a collaboration with Linkin Park should have been a match made in heaven. Yes, the nu-metal icons were going through one of the biggest shakeups of their career when coming out of A Thousand Suns, but The Hunting Party was the kind of heavy record that most people had been waiting to hear since Meteora, so getting Morello on for ‘Drawbar’ should have been perfect, right? Wrong.
Despite the band being known for making engaging instrumental pieces like ‘Session’ and ‘Cure For the Itch’, Morello seems to clock out halfway through this tune. The makings of a good track are in here somewhere with the ambient noises, but a lot of Morello does would barely work in the context of a jam session, only playing rudimentary guitar arpeggios in the background while letting the trippy effects do most of the work.
How rudimentary, you may ask? Well, considering this is the same person who made his own custom instrumental track for a Guitar Hero game, this feels somehow below that, almost like they were halfway through thinking of an idea but decided to throw a bunch of reverb on everything and call it a day.
It doesn’t necessarily diminish Morello’s pedigree as one of the finest guitar players of his generation, but looking at everything else he has done, this is the least necessary piece of his catalogue that anyone needs to focus on. He is a jack of all trades in everything from rock to hip-hop to folk music, but it turns out that the modern age of nu-metal was something he could have done without.
