Metal up your ass

Gather 'round children and I shall tell you a tale. Once upon a time, there was a band, and they were so wonderful that they made all us angry kids shout

FUCKING METALLICA!

Then they went away for awhile and when they returned they had cut their hair and we said

Fucking Metallica.

I won't even begin to explain their last album.

We all have those bands, the foundations that don't merely comprise the 'soundtrack to your life' cliché, but become a tangible part of existence, of growing up, of finding your place in the world. Yeah, that's also a cliché, but it's fucking true, no? Unless you hate music in which case kindly go Cheney yourself. For those of you older than I, the Beatles or the Stones or Zeppelin or Bowie or Elvis Costello or Miles Davis or whomever held -- and may still hold -- that coveted throne, remaining a touchstone. For me it was these guys. Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, ...And Justice For All. I've spun those four albums more than the rest of my collection combined. Believe me, as much as I love music, that's a lot of spins. Hell, I'm listening to Metallica right now as I type this. The only difference is that it isn't one of those hallowed, precious slices of anger and frustration and release, but their new one, their supposed return to form after the what-the-fuck boogie rock of Load and Reload and the metalized primal scream therapy of the universally panned St. Anger, Death Magnetic.

And I'm speaking of the music alone. You'll find no ham-fisted Napster bullshit, no sellout speak -- for the record, shifting genres this much isn't selling out, quality of the music be damned; tracks like Ronnie and 2x4 were what the kids were jonesing for in the mid-90s? Really? You fucking sheep. How come you never bitch about painters trying new shit? -- no Lars the out-of-touch Basquiat collector nor the running gag that the band became after the Some Kind of Monster documentary. I don't give a fuck about any of that garbage. We're all dickheads and assholes in our own way, we all fuck up at one time or another. Hell, I just corrected two typos in the last sentence alone.

Hmm. I'm getting dangerously close to not following my own dictum.

"Heh, heh, he said dick."

A heartbeat starts the album before eerie, single notes are plucked, the slow, brooding intro that the band used to perfection so many times, leading into the galloping thrash riff of That Was Just Your Life. The not-Rick Rubin production -- is there a more hands-off producer? -- is dry and the guitars are sharp, but there's slightly less of a bite than there should be, at least when compared to the Flemming Rasmussen jobs back in the old days. At least a buzzsaw with gently rounded edges can still cut through flesh. James Hetfield is, thankfully, singing less and barking more than on recent efforts -- St. Anger truly proving to be, in retrospect, even more of an anomaly than once thought, both musically and lyrically -- and, what's that? someone found Kirk Hammett! Actual guitar solos! A lot of them! Both pre- and post- solo, there are oodles of Justice-style parts-consciousness and, architecturally, that is the album that Death Magnetic most resembles.

Texturally, the band runs the gamut of their catalog, second track The End of the Line melding a sinewy, Load-style groove with choppy thrash runs and staccato drumming. Yes, Mr. Ulrich isn't, and never has been, in the same class as true percussion masters such as Slayer's Dave Lombardo, ex-Sepultura drummer Igor Cavalera and Charlie Benante from Anthrax, but for some reason, his rudimentary skills seem to fit the riffs -- most of the time. Not that I wouldn't mind a drummer who could actually hit the skins quickly without sounding sloppy when the band shifts into third gear. At least the drums don't sound as clicky as on Justice -- though they certainly don't crack as on Metallica -- but I'd wager they're a bit too high in the mix, at least for my tastes. Hetfield's vocals, with their jagged, intermittent intonations, remind me a bit of Death Angel's Mark Osegueda, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It does indeed get harder to scream the more grey hairs one collects.

Broken, Beat & Scarred takes a rubbery, black album aesthetic and fills in the gaps with bits and pieces of mid-paced thrash. The jackhammer repetition of riffs and vocal lines, though perhaps slightly overdone in the bridge, keeps the song glued together, enabling it to beat you over -- okay, finish the joke yourself.

First single The Day That Never Comes has far more in common, despite both what some knuckleheads will tell you and the song's subject matter gleaned from the lyrics, the video and various interviews with the band, with Fade to Black than One. Somber, dreamy chords and vocals trade licks with heavier measures before giving way to a Maiden-esque guitar duel before blowing up with the obligatory machine-gun climax.

Speaking of climaxes -- not that, perverts -- side one -- dating myself, ain't I -- climaxes with the spiritual successor to Enter Sandman, the superior All Nightmare Long, which severely ups the aggression meter with a barrage of Disposable Heroes-esque measures bookending the chorus through judicious use of tempo changes.

The album's first misstep is Cyanide, a track that sounds like a Reload leftover with better production and demonstrates what I'm sure is a common complaint: the songs are too long. This is actually one of the shorter works, clocking in under seven minutes, but its hefty bridge and solo is weighed down by slightly unfocused verses. Cut off a couple of minutes of fat, et voilà, instant okayness. I'm a big fan of long songs, and for the most part, the ones here seem to have been recorded at their natural length, but every ear is different, so varying mileage and such.

When I first saw the track listing, I audibly groaned when I read The Unforgiven III. Unfounded worries, so rest easy, young man. Not as good as the stellar original, it's markedly superior to the Hetfield-as-blue-eyed-crooner pseudo-sequel on Reload, mainly because it forges its melancholy using different -- for Metallica -- sparser elements, the song commencing with piano, understated strings -- hear that, Michael Kaman? Oh, that's right, you're dead -- and even a few bars of brass for color. Unlike the traditional metalli-ballad, it never catches fire and may bore the fuck out of the 'dude, where's my thrash?' crowd, but the progressive whole is better than the sum of its parts. This is what Nothing Else Matters should have been instead of the insipid dreck that it was. Fuck, I hate that song.

Recalling any number of past works, Harvester of Sorrow and Holier Than Thou above all others, The Judas Kiss mines that midtempo territory where lost souls go to brood. Like Cyanide, this is another track that could probably do with a shave and a haircut -- laugh, you bastards, laugh -- but it has its moments.

The nearly ten-minute instrumental Suicide & Redemption is less The Call of Ktulu epic mythologizing or an immortal hymn to despair à la To Live Is To Die, but a multi-layered, brick-by-brick jam that is the emotional kin to Orion. A meandering, dare I say it, joyful -- in that 'ha ha we're crazy but we don't care!' way -- riff slowly mutates into further riffs building upon each other before cycling back to the original, now-thickened, chords.

My Apocalypse concludes the album the way Damage, Inc. and Dyers Eve did so many years ago, with relentless pummeling, which is what I imagine the song's subject matter, a horrific car crash, might be like. At least until your charred body burned up in the gasoline explosion.

Death Magnetic is as much a return to form as one could expect from metalheads on the wrong side of forty. If they had continued down different, non-thrash paths, they would've been panned. By returning to their roots, they're panned. Believe me, many of their musical steps I questioned -- St. Anger is indeed 9/10ths crap. I would've loved Justice parts two, three and four. But I'm a fan, I'm not a member of the band. We all pick our favorite album by a group and secretly wish they'd repeat that formula over and over and over and over. Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett and Trujillo -- as new guy, does he really count in this equation? -- have aged, they have families, perhaps they've mellowed a bit. None of us have remained the same over the years, and the stories about Rubin having the band harken back to the thought process around the writing of Master of Puppets only exacerbated already existing disdain for whatever these guys would do. Fuck, that album was recorded in 1985. Most of you bitching internets jokers weren't even born yet or were still shitting in your Huggies --

Too 'get off my lawn?'

Even Metallica knew they couldn't repeat it. Did the Stones figure Tattoo You would be another Let It Bleed? C'mon.

At last, the bottom line: is Death Magnetic an A+ triumph of cutting-edge metal craftsmanship? Hell no. They're 45-year old rockers, not Beethoven or Mahler. And though never a master lyricist -- though he was exceptional on the overtly political ...And Justice For All -- Hetfield has gone back to the darker side of things, thankfully shedding the psychiatrist's couch blatherings of the last platter. Is it brutal? Um, Metallica wasn't the heaviest metal band around in 1987 -- just the best -- so if your basement is full of Xasthur demos and bootleg Mayhem concerts, no. Is it in the same league as those greats from over twenty years ago? Impossible. Those albums carry decades of emotional resonance, not to mention musical importance within the genre itself. But you know what? For a bunch of old dudes, it's surprisingly good and I'm glad they're again playing what they're best at.