MEGADETH — Youthanasia (review)

MEGADETH — Youthanasia album cover Album · 1994 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
2/5 ·
Stooge
From the outside of Youthanasia, you’d expect to get more of what Megadeth provided us with Countdown To Extinction. You have a familiar looking cover courtesy of artist Hugh Syme, but within we have something significantly different. This album takes on more of a hard rock and traditional metal sound and features little to no of the brand of thrash metal a Megadeth fan is accustomed to.

I honestly don’t mind seeing Megadeth going in more of a hard rock direction. There are some solid tunes on this album. “Reckoning Day”, one of the heaviest songs on Youthanasia, rocks pretty hard. The title track is also an interesting song, as is “The Killing Road”, and I like the melodic chorus of “I Thought I Knew It All”. However, even the stronger tracks still don’t rank among my favorite Megadeth songs.

The quality of Dave Mustaine’s vocals is always a topic of debate in metal circles. I think his voice suits Megadeth’s thrash metal style well, and he can be a rather competent singer as long as he doesn’t go overboard. In the case of this album, Mustaine’s vocals ruin quite a few of the songs for me. Much of his singing on “A Tout Le Monde” and the chorus of “Family Tree” are just some examples where his voice leaves me feeling a bit irritated.

I can recall a quote from Mustaine where he said that producer Max Norman advised the band to keep their songs to around a 120 beats-per-minute tempo, as this was a key to creating hit songs. Dave would have been wise not to follow these words. This is one of the main problems with this album: most of the songs are mid-tempo. Not exactly a bad attribute on it’s own, but you can literally have a metronome going during just about any song on the album and it will never drift off that click. It leaves much of the album sounding too stiff for my taste, almost as if the band is on autopilot when compared to the high-energy band of just a few years prior.

I can spin Youthanasia every once in a while, but not too frequently. I’d leave this album to those interested in seeing Megadeth go in a new direction, and fans of heavy rock might get a kick out of it.
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