Live and experience, elders would say.Metallica -2008- DeathMagnetic ...
Metallica -2008- DeathMagnetic ...
... for those who already heard it (yeah, it leaked, already) - what's your opinion on this one? For me personally, it's the first listenable album of theirs after 20 years. I mean, I can't believe it, 20 years. I think it's pretty decent album, which, so it seems, it's growing on me. Live and experience, elders would say.
Live and experience, elders would say.I am ... the One you warned me of
It is listenable. It is also sad because it's just that.
Here's a few scattered thoughts:
* If this wasn't made by Metallica, we'd hardly listen to it twice, it's just a mediocre goofy dad metal thing.
* The album doesn't have any teeth. Though it uses thrash metal techniques (polka beat, muted triplets etc) the riffs are not MENACING. They are mostly, happy. Seriously, listen to the chord progressions. They're like Ramones chord progressions, only with triplets and chug chugs
* Worst Ulrich playing thus far
* Their bassist knows some music (theory) that nobody else in the band ever bothered to learn in the last 20 years since they lost the other only member who knew music theory. This is mainly in my opinion the reason there's harmonized riffs and parts of riffs here and there. Good for them but it's not enough.
* All songs, in fine Metallica tradition, are overlong.
* The playing is more sloppy than it ever was. The solos are utterly meaningless, they sound like some school band's live improv solos. I mean Kirk Hammet was never a great technical player but his PHRASES in the classic album stuck to your mind and added to a mood. Think of the harmony solos in "One" towards the end of the song, how they cement the despair and starkness of the theme. There is nothing like this here.
* Speaking of "One" that bit in a song where it rips it off is a disgrace and one of the few actual face-holding-groaning parts of the album.
* The recording is very, VERY dry. There is little to no reverb on any part of the mix. I like dry recordings generally, and I like And Justice For All... but there is thrash metal dry and there's just punk band 'we did this with 100 bucks' dry production. Leads and solos especially need their reverb and delay and chorus to 'breathe' in a mix and float above it and not sound flimsy. These solos are just dry runs inside the mix, they sound like they could break at any point.
* The guitar distortion is too fuzzy, squared. And Justice For All had perfect thrash distortion (bricked and then the middle scooped out) and the Garage Inc EP had perfect oldschool metal distortion (not too much gain but LOUD in the mix). This is neither. It is a bad guitar tone.
* The lyrics are the worst Hetfield's ever written in his life. After St.Anger this is saying something. Reading them online made me groan every other line. Perhaps for people who like their metal purely in terms of sound this album might seem far better than for me who pays attention to what the singer is yodelling about. Very unconvincing stuff.
* And when the lyrics are not convincing, how could the singing be?
* Hetfield has long lost stopped putting any 'grain' in his singing, there is no aggression, there is no pulse. There's just an old dude with a bad voice singing uninteresting vocal lines about how love is a four letter word.
* There is one song that I believe is an alright composition sans lyrics in this album, but it would still be the worst song in Ride the Lightning if it was written back then (well, not worse than 'Escape' but still, almost).
All these things considered, it's a huge step up from St. Anger. But that isn't saying much because St.Anger for me is one of the few records by an once-great band I'd actually give a fat solid ZERO in a scale from 0 to 10 (even virtual eleven gets a honest 2 out of 10 for me!). This is a homely, dad-metally, toothless 5 in the same scale.
All this amounts to = Death.
Why? Death to mediocre HM. Every time we listen to an absolute WORST of the worst HM album, we know what we're doing, we're enjoying how bad it is. Every time we listen to an amazing HM record, we all know what that means. It is when we listen to a purely mediocre range record that we are cheapening ourselves. We are dragging down our standards. We are polluting our critical capacity by CONSUMING fast-food-Heavy-Metal. Not very good, not very bad, not very filling, but will keep us going through the day. That sort of consumerist mentality will be the death of good music, so I say, death to mediocrity instead. The only reason this will sell good though it's a purely mediocre record is because people - all of us - have a morbid fascination with just how worse the trainwreck that is Metallica can get. We can't resist looking at it. They know this. Ever since they stopped being able to make good music, their publicists started selling us 'THE METALLICA ACCIDENT' instead of 'METALLICA MUSIC'. We know all about their shitty personalities and we've seen movies about their emotional problems. That's all they have to sell nowdays. That's what the 'Metallica' brand (and not band name) stands for.
Here's a few scattered thoughts:
* If this wasn't made by Metallica, we'd hardly listen to it twice, it's just a mediocre goofy dad metal thing.
* The album doesn't have any teeth. Though it uses thrash metal techniques (polka beat, muted triplets etc) the riffs are not MENACING. They are mostly, happy. Seriously, listen to the chord progressions. They're like Ramones chord progressions, only with triplets and chug chugs
* Worst Ulrich playing thus far
* Their bassist knows some music (theory) that nobody else in the band ever bothered to learn in the last 20 years since they lost the other only member who knew music theory. This is mainly in my opinion the reason there's harmonized riffs and parts of riffs here and there. Good for them but it's not enough.
* All songs, in fine Metallica tradition, are overlong.
* The playing is more sloppy than it ever was. The solos are utterly meaningless, they sound like some school band's live improv solos. I mean Kirk Hammet was never a great technical player but his PHRASES in the classic album stuck to your mind and added to a mood. Think of the harmony solos in "One" towards the end of the song, how they cement the despair and starkness of the theme. There is nothing like this here.
* Speaking of "One" that bit in a song where it rips it off is a disgrace and one of the few actual face-holding-groaning parts of the album.
* The recording is very, VERY dry. There is little to no reverb on any part of the mix. I like dry recordings generally, and I like And Justice For All... but there is thrash metal dry and there's just punk band 'we did this with 100 bucks' dry production. Leads and solos especially need their reverb and delay and chorus to 'breathe' in a mix and float above it and not sound flimsy. These solos are just dry runs inside the mix, they sound like they could break at any point.
* The guitar distortion is too fuzzy, squared. And Justice For All had perfect thrash distortion (bricked and then the middle scooped out) and the Garage Inc EP had perfect oldschool metal distortion (not too much gain but LOUD in the mix). This is neither. It is a bad guitar tone.
* The lyrics are the worst Hetfield's ever written in his life. After St.Anger this is saying something. Reading them online made me groan every other line. Perhaps for people who like their metal purely in terms of sound this album might seem far better than for me who pays attention to what the singer is yodelling about. Very unconvincing stuff.
* And when the lyrics are not convincing, how could the singing be?
* Hetfield has long lost stopped putting any 'grain' in his singing, there is no aggression, there is no pulse. There's just an old dude with a bad voice singing uninteresting vocal lines about how love is a four letter word.
* There is one song that I believe is an alright composition sans lyrics in this album, but it would still be the worst song in Ride the Lightning if it was written back then (well, not worse than 'Escape' but still, almost).
All these things considered, it's a huge step up from St. Anger. But that isn't saying much because St.Anger for me is one of the few records by an once-great band I'd actually give a fat solid ZERO in a scale from 0 to 10 (even virtual eleven gets a honest 2 out of 10 for me!). This is a homely, dad-metally, toothless 5 in the same scale.
All this amounts to = Death.
Why? Death to mediocre HM. Every time we listen to an absolute WORST of the worst HM album, we know what we're doing, we're enjoying how bad it is. Every time we listen to an amazing HM record, we all know what that means. It is when we listen to a purely mediocre range record that we are cheapening ourselves. We are dragging down our standards. We are polluting our critical capacity by CONSUMING fast-food-Heavy-Metal. Not very good, not very bad, not very filling, but will keep us going through the day. That sort of consumerist mentality will be the death of good music, so I say, death to mediocrity instead. The only reason this will sell good though it's a purely mediocre record is because people - all of us - have a morbid fascination with just how worse the trainwreck that is Metallica can get. We can't resist looking at it. They know this. Ever since they stopped being able to make good music, their publicists started selling us 'THE METALLICA ACCIDENT' instead of 'METALLICA MUSIC'. We know all about their shitty personalities and we've seen movies about their emotional problems. That's all they have to sell nowdays. That's what the 'Metallica' brand (and not band name) stands for.
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MEXDefenderOfSteel
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Helm wrote:(impressive verbal extermination)
thumbs up for such an essay, wouldn't be able to compose anything like that even if I listened to something for years..
but, regarding my listening impression, I disagree - not to say that anything is wrong here, I just don't feel the same way. I like the album a lot (which probably doesn't mean too much as I even liked St. Anger and think, for example, Gods of War is a great record..)
I wouldn't go so far to rank it somewhere near the first four, but it is at least as good (not GREAT) as the black one. Which is something, after 17 years of (relatively spoken) starvation.
Down there in the Darkness
Centuries of Evil
And his Arms will take you deeper and deeper
Centuries of Evil
And his Arms will take you deeper and deeper
Helm, that's one of the best album reviews I've ever read. Are you sure you don't want to write a book about heavy metal?
As for my opinion on the album... I only listened to The Day That Never Comes. I was expecting it to sound like Avenged Sevenfold, but it sounded to me like a cross between Load and The X-Factor. There wasn't anything really nauseating about it (but I didn't read the lyrics). But just because it's not the worst album of all time doesn't mean it's worth buying.
As for my opinion on the album... I only listened to The Day That Never Comes. I was expecting it to sound like Avenged Sevenfold, but it sounded to me like a cross between Load and The X-Factor. There wasn't anything really nauseating about it (but I didn't read the lyrics). But just because it's not the worst album of all time doesn't mean it's worth buying.
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The Erlking
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Witchkiller
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The Erlking
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Oh, well, at least a place where people are realistic. When I see 35yo people raving about this album being "good", I just think that the fanboy thing just never dies.
The few songs I have listened to are just shadows of what they did -and for me they stopped writing good songs after Ride The Lightning because I never liked these longer and supposedly more complex songs they did after-. And they don't hide their "metal"core parts.
As Helm noticed, there's no Thrash-Metal there. Where's the energy ? Any pop-rock outfit for teens has more energy than these songs.
The few songs I have listened to are just shadows of what they did -and for me they stopped writing good songs after Ride The Lightning because I never liked these longer and supposedly more complex songs they did after-. And they don't hide their "metal"core parts.
As Helm noticed, there's no Thrash-Metal there. Where's the energy ? Any pop-rock outfit for teens has more energy than these songs.
Gott ist tot.
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Stormspell
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Yeah that "MISSION METALLICA" special preordering shit is fucking annoying! I signed for a free account in a lapse of boredom several months ago coz someone told me they have exclusive audio excerpts with kirk's solos, whcih was a lie of course...
Now I'm at my 3rd attempt to unsubscribe from this garbage and every further e-mail I get "hey chums, here's the exclusive chance to buy the HYPER-MEGA-RARE fanclub edition of the new album in 5-LP format in special coffin case for only $150, GIGA-LIMITED to 30,000 copies ONLY" pushes me a notch further towards the utter disgust...ugh!
Now I'm at my 3rd attempt to unsubscribe from this garbage and every further e-mail I get "hey chums, here's the exclusive chance to buy the HYPER-MEGA-RARE fanclub edition of the new album in 5-LP format in special coffin case for only $150, GIGA-LIMITED to 30,000 copies ONLY" pushes me a notch further towards the utter disgust...ugh!
Webstore: http://stormspell.bigcartel.com