Metallica! Rick Rubin! Death Magnetic! September 16 (-ish)!

Don't know about you, BJO, but I've seen a ton of "surprisingly unshit", "kinda hot!", and "decent" on here.

An embarrassing amount of, I mean.

Based on the several tracks I've heard, I thought it was alright. Definitely not as good as the early stuff, but okay. I think the most obvious weakness is James' lyrics, which seem more and more forced and juvenile as time goes by. The music also has a forced quality to it, but less so than the last album for sure. I also wish they'd turned up the bass. Need to listen to it more, I suppose.

I'm fully aware that me liking this album is akin to those losers who bought Hell Freezes Over.

PP, you like this ish??

The Masters of Puppets. Now that would be a great name for a band!

I only listened to side one so far, but I was very very pleasantly surprised. I can only imagine what a world it would be had they been produced by Rick Rubin 18 years ago and not Bob Rock.

And there's bass inside it!

(But don't get me wrong: Favoring something because it sounds like it could've been released in 1990 isn't the strongest case for saying it's a great record. All I can say is that sitting here at my desk job and listening to this album has not been a bad experience.)

I will be on New York radio station WNYC tomorrow at 2 PM EST debating the merits of this record with Ryan Schreiber. I'll be arguing in favor of the record, Schreiber will be arguing the official Pitchfork position, which is anti-. You can listen at 93.9 FM if you're in the New York area, or online at wnyc.org. Or you can ignore this announcement. That's fine too.

To paraphrase estela, if agreeing with Pitchfork is wrong, then I don't wanna be wrong.

After the second listen, I still like it. The parts where they break away from the songs and kick out the jams are really, really great. Also, as much as I want to criticize the chorus for being stupid, "Hunt you down without mercy, hunt you down all nightmare along!" is freaking catchy.

that's the only song on the album that feels at all vibrant to me

I wasn't expecting to love this album, either way. And the bits I have heard of it so far are pretty good...I like the clean sound a lot.

That said, the lyrics to "Broken, Beat and Scarred" sound like something that would become a fist-pumping epic to sullen teens who have heard of Nietzsche but haven't quite gotten around to reading him yet...if only it wasn't a bunch of middle-aged guys delivering the message.

It should be noted that, while I like this album, I think Death Angel and Testament put out far better records this year.

it's interesting that the official p-fork stance is anti- when they wrote so many nice things about it in the run-up

Also, as much as I want to criticize the chorus for being stupid, "Hunt you down without mercy, hunt you down all nightmare along!" is freaking catchy.

Best chorus on the album easy, especially when it comes in after the false ending. Am I giving Hetfield too much credit by reading the lyrics as a slightly tongue in cheek evocation of Kill Em All? Probably.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/node/145135

^they say it sounds "like epic 80s metal" here. o_0

didnt realize cosmo wrote the pfork review

it is both fair and well-written

I will be on New York radio station WNYC tomorrow at 2 PM EST debating the merits of this record with Ryan Schreiber. I'll be arguing in favor of the record, Schreiber will be arguing the official Pitchfork position, which is anti-.

This should be good.

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/145305-metallica-death-magnetic

Link for those too lazy to dig around the website. It is fair and well written, and I can't really argue with Cosmo's assertions, but my impressions are more positive overall.

I have some disagreements with his review, but I'll talk about those tomorrow. The biggest problem I have is that I don't think he should have ever taken the assignment. If you read his IO post, he wrote:

"I will listen to Death Magnetic out of completism and professional obligation. But I will not do so out of curiosity. The press sucked that away several hundred blog posts ago. I haven't even heard it, and I'm tired of it. It won't stop calling. I'll return its call in due time. Right now, though, I just want to tell Metallica: please go away."

Coming in with that kind of attitude was ultimately dishonest, it seems to me.

I don't really disagree with any of the specifics of the review but I get a lot more enjoyment out of it than that critic seems to. Though the more I listen to it, the more I realise that while they have their old energy back, I can't really see any of the new songs ever being regarded as classics.

I can argue with some of that.

Calling out Metallica for self-plagiarizing is like calling out John Fogarty for making songs that sound like "Run Through the Jungle". They're Metallica, right? The biggest fault against the band has been how far they've strayed away from their roots, in a bad way. Now they've returned to form and are getting criticized for it.

And if you're going to enjoy the record, you do have to put away any images of Jamez zhopping at Armani or Larz' dad sitting there on the couch saying "delete that." Railing against Metallica for making a record like this in their forties is an irrelevant argument. So fucking what? (ha, see what I did there.) I keep saying that if Death Magnetic had been released in 1990, Metallifans would be ranking it tied with Justice on their Metallilists.

It is what it is. I'm not telling my friends to run out and buy the record. But it's a nice release from the band, there's guitar solos on there, the drums weren't recorded inside a grain silo, and there are faint hints of someone playing a bass back there.

the guitars sound like shit and the solos are retarded, so i don't think metal fans would have liked it at any time

If I didn't know better, I'd say that you had it out for this record.

Cosmo's point about the vulnerability is a good one. I think the reason that the Death Angel and Testament records were so damn good is because they are still writing about world events and things that piss them off externally, as opposed to the more internal route that Metallica took. Another difference is that those bands weren't as massively successful as Metallica, so they don't try nearly as hard to live up to their reputations as Metallica do.

give it a year and yall will too xpost

I felt similar about the last Iron Maiden record, Rox.

sorry if i'm coming off as just a hater, but i worry that any appraisal of this record in any way favorably comparing it to MOP or any of the other older metallica albums is so missing the point of what made those albums great, which was GREAT songs and GREAT guitar sound/creative playing. these things are missing 100% from this record. there is not a trace of that here. and those qualities, while they exist in the past, are what made metallica monstrous and to be feared and huge and awesome, and they are worth standing up for, IMO.

of course there are other differences: energy, verve and some other abstractions, etc, but these are the ones that i'd say this album is completely devoid of

I don't think anyone here (except maybe Phil) is arguing that Death Magnetic is nearly as good as Master of Puppets! This lemon is just a lot closer to lemonade than anything they've put out since The Black Album.

>any appraisal of this record in any way favorably comparing it to MOP or any of the other older metallica albums is so missing the point of what made those albums great, which was GREAT songs and GREAT guitar sound/creative playing. these things are missing 100% from this record. there is not a trace of that here.

I'm not arguing that this is as good as MOP; what I'm arguing is that this album combines the strengths they exhibited on that album and Justice with the best aspects of the very flawed Load and ReLoad.

In direct response to roxy, I like the guitar sound on this record a lot. I like Kirk Hammett's solos on this record a lot.

I wouldn't describe Hammett's soloing as retarded, but it certainly is ludicrous. Which is as it should be.

the thing they used to have over other bands was that shit was so catchy, even if it was a 10 min instrumental. now they're thrashy again but almost the whole album was in one ear out the other (not like i'm walking around with a walkman and a cassette 94/7 like young me did with master of puppets, but still).

I'm not even saying it's as good as Justice, which quite honestly was phoned-in on the rebound from Cliff's death and two years without a proper album release. (Hell, it even sounds like it was recorded from a telephone in some parts.)

I just wonder if any of you would've bitched in 1989 about Steel Wheels not being as good as Let It Bleed or Some Girls.

justice is amazing and probably my favorite metallica album for real

...And Justice For All: 20 Years Later

Justice is arguably the most well-written Metallica album, Puppets is easily the most well executed.

lars sounds like he doesn't give a fuck on the new one (in a bad way)

at least they fixed that godawful snare

But they broke their bass drum instead.

^^^^^^^^^

every metal band has clicky bass drums these days!

"that dates it to THIS PERIOD"

TS: Death Magnetic vs Divine Intervention - which is the better "our classic album part 2"

?

I'll take this album over Divine Intervention, easily. Clucky kicks and all.

(It's weird, I find myself nowhere near as obsessive about kick drum sounds as other metal fans)

and justice for all has the trebliest, most attack-heavy bass drums of all time but it works.

Divine Intervention is my least favorite Bostaph-era Slayer album. (I'm a big fan of Diabolus In Musica, an album I think is sorely underrated.)

I'm not obsessive about kick drums. They are just egregiously distracting on this album. Did they really need to put them so high in the mix?