METALLICA — Death Magnetic (review)

Album · 2008 · Thrash Metal

3.5/5 · 2010-05-29
Pekka

Despite supporting Metallica through the lean years of the turn of the century and liking all their releases to some extent, I too think they peaked during the three albums released from 1984 to 1988 and when there were talks of their return to "proper" metal with the album they were now making I guess my hopes got pretty high. But when I heard that they were listening to their old albums and trying to get into that mindset I got cautious, I didn't want them to make their old albums again. Part of my respect for Metallica comes from the fact that they've always been going forward, more or less succesfully.

Then came the Mission Metallica website with studio clips and finally a complete song in Cyanide. I said hell yeah. Something from the 80s, something from the 90s, something completely new. Despite one pretty clumsy transition during the instrumental section this is still one of my favourites from the album. To give some insight into my Metallica fanboyism I had ordered the coffin box set version of the album, but as that was delayed I went and stood in queue outside the record store in the middle of the night the night the album was released to get the regular version to spin.

They're certainly back in a more thrashy scene and that produces some fine results in tracks like That Was Just Your Life and My Apocalypse, but not surprisingly my favourites from the album are the ones where I feel like they're doing something that they haven't so much done before - the twists-and-turns hyperactivity of All Nightmare Long, the aforementioned Cyanide and the epic piano-laden Unforgiven III. They almost cover some of their former songs in the likes of The Day That Never Comes and Suicide & Redemption, but both fall a bit flat after promising starts, the former because of its patchy instrumental section and the latter because of its repetition of quite solid but ultimately unmemorable riffs. Really fine parts in both songs, but especially the first reveals a couple of major problems this album has.

Problem number one: There are a couple of "what the hell was that?" moments on this album, most glaringly the unbelievably clumsy "This I swear!" part on The Day. Problem number two: Lars has always known he's not the most gifted drummer on the planet, and while on the earlier albums his efforts to compensate for his shortcomings resulted in some very creative stuff, on this album he settles for the shaky, straight beating without trying to make it interesting in any way. As he's done live for quite some time, he doesn't drive the music forward but tries not to fall behind. Problem number three: Despite some promising parts in for example The Unforgiven III and The Day That Never Comes Kirk's solos offer absolutely nothing memorable. Soloing for the sake of soloing after being locked down on St. Anger, he makes a couple of good starts but more often than not ends up shredding his way into dead end. And the Problem number four: The sound. I haven't listened to the original version of the album for ages because my ears couldn't take the super loud beating of the compressed production, luckily I was able to get my hands on the remixed Guitar Hero version.

Despite all these problems this album offers a lot of enjoyable music, most of the material being very solid by all Metallica standards. Not really up to par with their 80s albums and in my book not really up to par with Load, but definitely worthy of checking out if you enjoy their material.