Albums

Album Review: Metallica

[Album: Death Magnetic]
[Label: Warner / Vertigo]

Poor old Metallica. With ‘Death Magnetic’ kept so fiercely under wraps for so long there was always going to be only one way this could go. 10 days prior to its scheduled worldwide release, the album was leaked to the public when a French record store took it’s consignment without the intended embargo instructions included. To be honest, the band seemed to take the news pretty well with Lars Ulrich commenting “If you’d told me six months ago that our record wouldn’t leak until 10 days out, I would have signed up for that.” Quite a controlled reaction when you consider just how far the band went when taking on Napster, the filesharing site. Perhaps he didn’t want to take any of the limelight away from what they’d created.

Just what had they created? Well, before we even begin the dissection it is important we look at just how the band went about shedding the ugly skin that had built up around them following the steady slump in songwriting quality they had experienced over time - the low point being ‘St. Anger’ and the subsequent release of the ludicrous warts and all rockumentary, ‘Some Kind Of Monster’. There was only one way they could truly do that and that was through a different approach. The change of producer appears to have been the main catalyst for this, with Rick Rubin determined to free the band from the stagnation that had occurred under Bob Rock. Rubin set the task for Metallica to take themselves back to how they were feeling when they constructed the ‘Master Of Puppets’ album, in his opinion their finest work. The mission became to write a sequence of tracks that would grace their 1986 classic. So have they achieved it?

Well, there’s no doubt the band have re-discovered the art of the full-on thrash. They haven’t completely moved away from the hard rock riff but they have found a way of implementing it amongst a batch of tracks where it isn’t the be all and end all. There’s more complexity to their construction with the songs rarely dipping under the seven-minute mark. What this has done is create an exciting return to a more cerebral, more energetic and, certainly, less predictable album. By contrast, it’s also made the tracks more dense and not as instantly accessible.

Opener, ‘That Was Just Your Life’ goes from pulsing heartbeat, via instantly recognisable sustained guitar, and into bristling thrash, all setting the tone perfectly. With ‘The End Of The Line’ and ‘Broken, Beat & Scarred’ following suit it’s all actually very reminiscent of the material on ‘…And Justice For All’ with rapid drum sections finding their way around Hetfield’s monosyllabic half-spat vocal to give something worth getting excited about. There’s even short sections of lead guitar which drag you further forwards in time to “Black Album” material.

On some tracks the drums are very loud in the mix (I’ve never understood why this is generally a feature of Metallica records - Lars Ulrich’s ego, perhaps?) but here they are especially tight, punchy and intensely punishing. Though when they slip into a steady, formulaic pattern, as they do on large sections of ‘The Day That Never Comes’ and the chug-heavy, radio-friendly ‘Cyanide‘, the levels become intrusive. ‘The Unforgiven III’ suffers from it too but, even worse, the entire track is everything I thought it would be… a self-obsessed in-joke. Enough, already!

When everything clicks into place, however, the utter joy of hearing the band finally deliver again is overwhelming. The fiery furnace that is ‘All Nightmare Long’ flickers with menace, as the crushing breaks collapse into the rippling, pumped-up chorus. The guitars and drums interlock and hammer out insane sequences of speed-shredding. This is the sound that you’d hear if you stuck your head up the exhaust of the space shuttle’s booster rocket as it let rip. And if that doesn’t do it for you, then ‘Suicide & Redemption‘ and ‘My Apocalypse’ are there as truly epic back-ups. One is a 10-minute instrumental collector’s item riff-slog of clean versus dirty, and the other is a headbanger’s wet dream of frenzied guitar and hammered snare out of which thrust James Hetfield’s messed-up visions - “Crushing metal, ripping skin, tossing body, mannequin, spilling blood, bleeding gas, mangle flesh, snapping spine, dripping bloody valentine.”

With the news that this album was due for release, one major question needed answering - will Metallica remember that they are a band and not a brand? The answer is, clearly, yes (pat on the back for Mr. Rubin)… but (yes, there‘s a but) there are still some Unforgiveable [sic] habits they need to cure themselves of.

For Fans Of: Megadeth, Black Label Society, Pantera

Band Link:
Metallica

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