Death Magnetic - Reviewed!

Well folks, here it is.



It's taken 5 years, but Metallica has finally released a new studio album. Right off the bat, let me make one thing clear; I did not HATE St. Anger. To say St. Anger was a polarizing album is a massive understatement. For many Metallica fans it was the final nail in the coffin after the lukewarm back to back releases of Load and ReLoad (the only two Metallica albums I do not own), the thrash metal pioneers had totally lost touch with their core fan base, the people who still lusted after uptempo classics like 'Battery' and 'No Remorse'. Part of the reason I did not viscerally despise St. Anger has to do with the themes the band explored in that album, I liked the general sense of disquieted madness that seemed to fill the entire album. Songs like 'The Unnamed Feeling' were a solid outing amongst several forgettable tracks in my opinion. The band could still craft a decent riff, but much of that was lost in the terrible production. When I first heard it I enjoyed the raw feel, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that sort of production was never a good idea for a band like Metallica, whose most agro album 'Kill Em All', still had decent production value, at least alongside the tepid St. Anger. That said, AMG, Rolling Stone and NME all agreed with me that it was not the universally shitty album that some of the more 'active' internet metal heads thought it to be (not that Rolling Stone is worth it's weight in liquid shit, but that's besides the point).

Anyways, enough of that. Part of the reason I even went into my opinion on St. Anger had to do with the themes the band explored in that album, and how starkly they contrast with this one. For me, this is an unabashedly superior outing and a lot of that hinges on the fact that Metallica gets back to the ideas they used in prior albums, with a new spin on them and unifying obsession with death. Drug addiction, Religion, Nightmares, Child Abuse, all of these are present on Death Magnetic. To say Metallica is simply rehashing old crap that worked for them in the past would be doing this album a gross disservice, it is still unlike any previous Metallica album. The furious syncopation is there, but many of the riffs have more swing to them than the classic Metallica of the 1980s. You can see they've taken some salient points from the Load era, without duplicating the mistakes they made there, by using the boogie to power the main riff at most and then reverting back to furious rapid fire riffing. The speed of this album is ridiculously faster than anything on the last 4 Metallica albums.

Lyrically I find this album to be extremely satisfying. I've read a few people say that they found the lyrics to be embarrassingly simplistic, citing "Love is a four letter word" in 'The Day That Never Comes' and "What don't kill ya makes ya more strong" off of 'Broken, Beaten & Scarred'. Taken out of context, most lyrics will sound stupid, in the former the whole idea is that love is merely a concept, not a reality to the protagonist of this song, a flowery epithet that people use that has no real meaning in his life. In the latter, the grammar is atrocious, but with the riff and drum line backing it, that line is pure badness, the perfect work out track, especially if you're shadow boxing or doing some bag work.

'The End of The Line,' 'The Judas Kiss' & the opening track 'That Was Just Your Life' really impressed me. I also thoroughly enjoyed 'Unforgiven III' as it went back to the spaghetti western feel that made the first track a stone cold classic, however nothing can erase the shit festival that was 'Unforgiven II' from my mind. This is definitely the thrashiest outing Metallica has had in 2 decades, the year '... And Justice For All' was released. Finally, Kirk Hammet has returned to bitch slap the haters for ever doubting him, face metling solos abound on this album, as Kirk seems to have loosed all the pent up energy that he was unable to expend on the recording of St. Anger.

This album is essentially Metallica's 6th best release, but few bands have 5 classics in their repitoire. At this point in their career Metallica is the kind of band that people either love or hate, but if you fall into the former category you will enjoy the shit out of this album.

8.5/10