Holy S---! Zach De La Rocha has a new song out!!

Damn! Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! New music from Zach De La Rocha! With the drummer from Mars Volta!

I gotta say, the new single from One Day As a Lion, the collabo between De La Rocha and Jon Theodore is a long time coming. "International Wild" is a living, breathing, beasting attack on the Iraqi War and the government officials who perpetrated the whole mess. (to listen, click here)

Rocking over a demented siren guitar riff, Zach's controlled rage spews from the microphone with deceptive force. He sounds relieved to have a proper venue for railing against the powers that be. The hook sounds fierce over crashing drums and synthy-riffs:

Both Muhammed and Christ, word life, would lay your body down/to a tune so wild international/In the desert full of bullets let your body rot/with my chrome, with my verse, with my body rock...


The statement from Anti-Records, which is releasing the album, reads:

“One Day As A Lion is both a warning delivered and a promise kept.”

“A defiant affirmation of the possibilities that exist in the space between kick and snare. It’s a sonic reflection of the visceral tension between a picturesque fabricated cultural landscape, and the brutal socioeconomic realities it attempts to mask. One Day As A Lion is a recorded interaction between Zack de la Rocha and Jon Theodore from Los Angeles, California.”

“The name taken from the infamous 1970 black and white, captured by legendary Chicano photographer George Rodriguez featuring a center framed tag on a white wall in an unspecified section of Boyle Heights. It reads: ‘It’s better to live one day as a lion, than a thousand years as a lamb.’ This record is a stripped down attempt to realize this sentiment in sound.”

All I got to say is that I'm happy to see Zach putting out new product. Watching Rage Against the Machine last year during their run on the "Rock The Bells" tour was a bit underwhelming. Sure, they still had their touch, rocking through their set with as much ferocity as 1998, but that was the problem.

Ten years ago, Rage rocked my world. Seeing them live last year was just a sad reminder of how much momentum they lost. Their break-up pretty much derailed any hope of a rhyme revolution, of music as political force, of art as a form of social policy.

Listening to Zach's new stuff, my expectations are still tempered. Government will not be overthrown with a mic and a guitar, but we can always hope. We can always rage. We can always pray.

I've been bumping this song straight for the past 30 minutes, non-stop. No joke.