The Fabled City

With The Fabled City, Morello's growth as a topical songwriter is enormous; he's brought the singer/songwriter into a cultural discussion, a dialogue, where we can dialogue not only about characters (who are treated with dignity as speaking subjects, not merely as objects to hang a tune on) and their struggles, but also with popular music again, as a ready tool for awareness of the world around us.

Morello's singing could inspire chuckles rather than revolution. But on The Fabled City, he and O'Brien have dressed it up enough to make it seem almost super at times.

With The Fabled City, Morello’s Nightwatchman has fulfilled much of the promise hinted at on One Man Revolution. [Winter 2008]

Lyrically, Morello still goes over the top, piling on biblical references and Dylanesque nonsense like "one-eyed crow, tappin' on the windowpane." But with a solid band behind him, he seems much more confident in his new role as a modern protest troubadour.

Arguably anything Morello releases is worth listening to and The Fabled City, while not perfect, is no different. [Oct 2006, p.153]

The protest ballads plod, and even the song about praying for God to drown the president sounds more weary than pissed. The Nightwatchman is that rare crusader whose secret identity is more exciting than his alter ego.

On his second agit-folk album under the Nightwatchman persona, Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello incorporates electric instrumentation and foregrounds his sonorously ponderous baritone, aspiring to, if not attaining, the gravity of Johnny Cash, Tom Waits, and Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen.

As a lyricist he’s dull and unimaginative and as a singer he’s extremely limited: both facts detract considerably from the obvious passion he exhibits elsewhere for his music and his politics.

Thus the biggest flaw on The Fabled City lies not within the music, but with the brusque seriousness of Morello’s rhetoric and delivery that veers dangerously close to self-parody.