Zack de la Rocha has always been a spitfire and his counter-cultural, geo-political band Rage Against the Machine certainly seemed to fit his emphatic speak-singing style.

• Album: One Day as a Lion
• Artist: One Day as a Lion
• Label: Anti-
• Release: July 22, 2008
• Artist Website

Zack de la Rocha has always been a spitfire and his counter-cultural, geo-political band Rage Against the Machine certainly seemed to fit his emphatic speak-singing style.

On what is ostensibly his solo debut—no discredit to drummer Jon Theodore (formerly of the Mars Volta) who completes the duo—Rocha spits a litany of political and philosophical rants against the status quo, complacency and consumerism.

(Really did anyone expect him to go soft?) In each of the five songs, a snarling backdrop of gritty keyboard riffs swing like axe handles over pugilistic, pounding rhythms that combined seem to sonically echo the maxim “It’s better to live one day as a lion, than a thousand years as a lamb.”