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Metallica - Death Magnetic

I'm going to be honest here, the last complete Metallica album of new material I listened to was Metallica (a.k.a. The Black Album). I heard snippets of Load and Re-Load, and I heard Garage inc., but that was a covers album. I missed St. Anger entirely, mostly because of reviews, but I own the Some Kind of Monster DVD, so I've got a taste of that. What I mean to say is that I am not well versed in modern Metallica, but I own ...And Justice for All on vinyl and the black album on CD, and I have borrowed the previous three records from friends. So I know from fucking thrash. I know Megadeth, and Slayer, and Anthrax, and together with Metallica they made the holy quartet of thrash metal.

Death Magnetic is fucking thrash. No, it probably isn't Metallica's best album, Justice... will forever hold that title. What Death Magnetic IS is a return to form. I put the CD in, heard the first bar of super fast buzzsaw guitar and cranked that shit to eleven. If you want to compare Metallica to their contemporaries, they are doing better work than Slayer has done since the mid 90s, and than Megadeth has done since 1991. I think Anthrax is playing a few shows here and there, but they are still basically dead.

What seems to have happened here is that Rick Rubin re-invigorated the the band with the venom of metal. That bearded guru injected quicksilver into the blood and bones of each and every member of this band. The introduction of Robert Trujillo as a songwriting partner certainly didn't hurt either. I think the guys went home after touring on St. Anger and pulled out their old Mötorhead and Thin Lizzy records and remembered what it meant to rock again. And let's be honest, St. Anger was probably a "recovery record" for James anyway. Everybody gets one.

The track sequencing on this album is great. there are two almost down-tempo songs on here: "The Day That Never Comes" and "The Unforgiven III", yes another fucking Unforgiven song, but it's not all that bad. They are spaced three tracks apart, and create good breathing room between the brutality of the tracks that come before and after them. There is one instrumental track: "Suicide & Redemption" which is the band's first instrumental since "To Live is To Die" off of ...Justice... and at goddamned near ten minutes it has all of the ins and outs and intricacies, and slowness, and speed you could want from a Metallica Instrumental.

On the subject of negative fan reviews: I just don't get it. (shh don't mention that this is ostensibly a fan review too) I might be a bad barometer for this sort of thing because I have and listen to such a diverse selection of music, but my home base is always in metal and industrial. Maybe the problem is that the kids don't remember what Metallica was back in the 80s, and they only know post Black Album material. Which makes me wonder how people hated St. Anger and the loads so much. Hell, even the self-titled album was panned by hard core fans for being "too accessible." Let me tell you, "Death Magnetic" does not suffer this fate horrible fate of accessibility, and there was not a single bad song on Black. Then again Lily Allen's Alright, Still topped my best of 2006 list, so take that as you will. The fact of the matter is that metalheads hate everything. I'll bet you a dollar that they are all at home rocking this record every night for the next three months.

The one place Death Magnetic does suffer, however is that it is another victim of the "Loudness War". The Songs are good, they are heavy and they are loud; too loud. So loud in fact that no matter what I do with my equalizer I still get clipping on certain channels. Mostly in the high pitch of guitar solos and the bass drum. I am in no way an audiophile. As a matter of fact I have permanent hearing loss in both ears, but I can still hear the waves warping around the edges, and it isn't a pretty sound. It isn't hyper prevalent in every song, but there are solos in at least half of the songs in the album that just sound wrong because they are pushed into the mud of the rest of the mix.

You want a rating out of ten? 8.3/10 which is a passing grade on any scale.