For a couple of years now, rock fans who remember the Beavis and Butt-head era have been watching the bands they grew up on turn into heritage acts. Tune into any modern-rock radio station in the country and you can’t escape the grunge hit parade: "Smells like Teen Spirit," "Jeremy," "Black Hole Sun," "Would?" Until a few months ago, the same stations would almost never play any new music from the voices behind those songs, for obvious reasons. Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Alice in Chains’ Layne Staley died young. Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell took the artistic high road long ago and have been paying the price on the pop charts ever since.

But now, 11 years after punk broke, several of Seattle’s finest are staging comebacks. Cobain is ruling rock radio from beyond the grave with the previously unreleased Nirvana track "You Know You’re Right." Pearl Jam are back in stores with a new album, Riot Act (Epic), which is the seventh studio disc of their consistently inventive career. And Cornell is making the biggest noise of them all: a year and a half after it was announced that he was starting a new band with Tom Morello, Tim Commerford, and Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine, the group finally have a name, Audioslave, and a new album, also called Audioslave (Epic/Interscope).

Audioslave also have their first rock-radio smash: the snarling rave-up "Cochise," which dispels any skepticism about the chemistry between the veteran alternative-rockers with a ferocious opening guitar riff from Morello. Cornell’s piercing howl wrestles with the song’s explosive backbeat, and the lyrics find him dealing with a familiar grunge predicament: his friend is on a path to self-destruction and he can’t figure out what to do. So he throws up his hands in frustration: "Go on and save yourself/And take it out on me." He finds catharsis in the band’s primal Zep funk. And though Morello and company don’t have anything to prove, they sound revitalized by the opportunity Cornell’s voice gives them to explore melody and dynamics.

The Audioslave story is a tumultuous one that dates back to Zack de la Rocha’s quitting Rage Against the Machine two years ago. The rest of the group immediately announced that they had no intention of breaking up, and they went ahead with Renegades (Epic), a searing album of revamped cover songs that showed they were still at the top of their game. It was Renegades’ producer, Rick Rubin, who suggested the band meet with Cornell, who had embarked on an undistinguished solo career after Soundgarden broke up in ’97.

The two parties clicked, announced they were working together on a permanent basis, and started writing songs for their first album. Audioslave was just about finished when Cornell abruptly quit the band, right after it was announced that they would be making their concert debut at OzzFest 2002. The group were having business problems, and they eventually decided to ditch their old management and sign with the Firm (Korn, Backstreet Boys) — a move that allowed Cornell to return to the fold in September. But the logistical nightmares weren’t over yet: the two parties also had separate recording contracts with competing major labels. In a highly unusual move, Epic and Interscope agreed to alternate marketing and distribution costs with each album. The packaging of the new disc bears the imprints of both labels.

Audioslave is the sound of a band worth fighting for, and the musicians come up with some of their best material in years. Having Cornell’s prodigious vocal range at their disposal, the Rage boys mix quiet ballads and space-age psychedelia into their signature funk-metal apocalypse. Cornell chases abstract themes with a healthy combination of sarcasm and spirituality, and he rocks harder on the microphone than he has since Soundgarden. And Rubin, whose stellar work on recent hit albums by Red Hot Chili Peppers and System of a Down has solidified his vanguard status, is the disc’s other key contributor. His characteristically dry production puts the spotlight where it belongs: on some of rock’s most talented players.

First and foremost among these is Morello, who reinvented rock-guitar playing on the first Rage album and hasn’t slowed down since — Audioslave might be his most outlandish work to date. Morello’s riffs move like a bulldozer, and his solos push the music into the stratosphere. He gets soulful on the introspective "Like a Stone," and he breaks out his trademark siren effect on the raucous "Bring ’Em Back Alive." He goes completely bonkers on "Shadow on the Sun," starting his solo with a tantrum of haphazard blips and eventually cutting loose with an exotic free-for-all. With its lumbering pulse and feverish Cornell vocal turn, that song is the disc’s high-octane centerpiece.

On the Rage-like stompers "Show Me How To Live" and "Light My Way," Cornell shrieks with the abandon of his youth and throws in plenty of boisterous ad libs. He’s been into quieter soundscapes since Soundgarden’s ’94 masterpiece Superunknown (A&M), and he gets a couple of improbably good ballads out of his new bandmates. Morello actually strums an acoustic guitar on "I Am the Highway," and Cornell’s aching vocals underscore the song’s mournful narrative.

But Cornell saves his most powerful performance for the brooding "Getaway Car." The band give him a slow-burning funk groove to work with, and he improvises a chilling falsetto blues line to go with the wry chorus: "Settle up and I’ll help you find/Something to drive/Before you drive me insane." It’s unlike anything in the Soundgarden or Rage catalogue, and that’s the whole point. Sure, Audioslave would have been a more exciting idea in ’94. But on their first album, these guys suggest they’d be a force to be reckon with in any decade.

Alternative-rock old-timers will remember Chris Cornell’s first supergroup, Temple of the Dog, whose ’91 Temple of the Dog (A&M) is a grunge classic. Cornell was joined on the disc by the entire current line-up of Pearl Jam, who were the last of Seattle’s big four to form and who had the biggest-selling rock album of the era with their ’91 debut, Ten (Epic). The death of Layne Staley earlier this year means they’re the last grunge band standing. And their record sales have been declining for years: their previous album, 2000’s Binaural (Epic), was the first of their career that didn’t go platinum.

But Pearl Jam remain one of rock’s most popular touring attractions, and the band sound as important as ever on their ambitious new Riot Act. Recorded with one-time Soundgarden producer Adam Kasper in Seattle, it’s a low-key affair that continues in the casually experimental direction of the group’s previous few albums. Pearl Jam have also long been one of rock’s most successful democracies: frontman Eddie Vedder gets most of the attention, but they’ve always spread the songwriting duties around. And with one of Chris Cornell’s old writing buddies, former Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, back for his second album with the band, their current line-up is the best they’ve ever had.

The first single from Riot Act, "I Am Mine," is a big-hearted waltz with an organic tenderness that recalls kindred spirits R.E.M. The band don’t let their roots-rock rumble overpower the song’s pretty melodies, and Vedder’s lyrics trade in the kind of earnestness that made him a grunge god in the first place: "I know I was born and I know that I’ll die/The in between is mine/I am mine." He gets even sappier on the organ-laced "Love Boat Captain," a bittersweet tribute to the nine fans who got crushed to death at a Pearl Jam concert in Denmark two years ago: "It’s already been sung, but it can’t be said enough/All you need is love."

Those two songs are the album’s big pop statements, but elsewhere Pearl Jam show they’ve still got more than enough punk attitude to go around. "Save You" is a tough-love treatise that rivals Audioslave’s "Cochise" in loud guitar frustration. Compassion wins out in the end, but anger gets the best of Vedder in the song’s chorus: "Fuck me if I care, but I’m not leaving here." The disc’s most effective tirade is "Bushleaguer," a sinister jab at President Bush that’s too silly to be self-righteous. "Born on third, thinks he got a triple," sneers Vedder in the song’s funniest verse, and guitarist Stone Gossard’s off-kilter riffs are no joke.

The biggest surprise on Riot Act comes halfway through the disc, where the band get off their Crazy Horse for a few songs and invent something like the Pearl Jam version of new wave. Cameron grabs a guitar and bangs out a haunting melodic flutter on "You Are," a brooding track with a mechanized pulse that could have been lifted from the old ZZ Top ballad "Rough Boy." Vedder ups the tempo and tries his hand at electro on "Green Disease," which pits a stellar guitar hook of its own against an insistent new-wave drum pattern. The glammed-up "Ghost" and the gentle ballad "Thumbing My Way" cover more familiar territory for the group, but it’s their versatility that shines through in the end. Superstardom may be a thing of the past for Pearl Jam, but it would seem their fun has just begun.