New-school Metallica

As luck would have it, I was given the new Metallica album (Death Magnetic) by my girlfriend for my birthday this past week. The first thing I noticed was how the cover was arranged, especially the rear, with the whole thing laid out the same way as Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning and etc. This gave me hope. It was not entirely dashed, either.

Say about 80% of the songs on it are pretty good, with both guitars sounding the best they have since the black album. Hetfield's lyrics can get a little bit contrived at times; in The Day That Never Comes, saying that "love is a four letter word" is a little childish and just not the kind of thing I'd would expect to see on any well produced artist's album. That said, the riffage is good times throughout, coming to a very nicely riff-led instrumental, Suicide and Redeption, near the end of the disc. It's far from Orion or Call of Cuthulu, but I like it.

Sadly, Lars has not really become a better drummer in the past 20 years, and seems to be falling on the same patterns, overall. There's a few cool little steady, mid song beat changes and at least one neat fill, but it's mostly same old Lars.

That said, Kirk seems to have a bit of issue breaking out of his old habits, which end up sounding exactly the same over time; you can dress up a chromatic scale, but it's still a chromatic scale. Of course, he has some brilliant moments: Suicide and Redemption has a couple really good solo moments, but most of us know that Hetfield probably wrote those.

Trujillo is a fairly good bassist, as far as I've seen, and it comes across a few times in the album, wherein he can be found riffing away and not doing a bad job, either.

I would summarize it as a well written record that could be a tiny bit better, but, on the whole, is worth the time of any vague Metalica fan. Definitely nothing to get any newbies hooked on the band, it seems, but I could be wrong.