VI. VI. VI.
Death Magnetic kicks off with That Was Just Your Life, its reverb-drenched, cascading guitar picking sounding more than a little bit like those which define the calm-before-the-storm in many a metal-era Suicidal Tendencies exercise. You half-expect one of Rocky George’s sweetly dissonant guitar leads to come-a-weeping, or hear Mike Muir chime in with: what the hell’s going on around here?
The galloping guitar propelling That Was Just Your Life is quite comforting and sad, really—like running into an old friend at a funeral. It kind of sounds like old Metallica. Ulrich’s double kick, though played with perfect precision, is such an oddity that it sounds like he’s merely proving he can still do it. Though Rick Rubin's production is similar in some ways to ...And Justice for All, it sounds decidedly more overdriven. And the cymbals on the bridge sound as if they were mic’d up and compressed by Dave Fridmann in an attempt to best the oversaturation of Sleater-Kinney’s excellent swansong The Woods.
Death Magnetic sounds like no other Metallica record, and sounds like them all.
When Hetfield extends the word die to diyyeeeeeaah! to conclude the verse, he sounds a little more than a lot like his former self. But the song works better when Hetfield keeps his mouth shut—his affectations often sound forced, a product of the same determination and discipline that negotiated his sobriety. And his lyrics are a constant reminder of the new Metallica trying to inhabit old Metallica space. Now, when Hetfield scowls, it’s clear that his loyalties have changed:
The End of the Line starts out promising enough, with some tricky time signatures rolling out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by some steam-rolled palm muting. Then it quickly devolves into some sort of blunter, less-nuanced version of the verses of Pearl Jam’s Even Flow, which is, itself, neither particularly subtle nor nuanced. The song manages to get back on track for the verse before insisting on repeating that goddamned bridge again.
There’s uncompromising delight in hearing James Hetfield spit out sinister word associations like Choke! Asphyxia!, that is, until it becomes apparent that he’s talking about the rigors of being a spotlight-hungry celebrity. It's as if he's the Ghost of Christmas Future coming to say, meet your maker, Paris Hilton.
Still, repeated listenings to that palm-muted verse could cause quite the strain on the muscles in the hinge of your neck, especially if yours are as out-of-practice and creaky as mine.
After the chorus, Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield masterfully harmonize their chunked-out guitar runs as if they were playing aural BATTLESHIP with Iron Maiden. And, wait a second—is that bass I hear? Wow. Here, Rubin negotiates something, literally, unheard of in most Metallica records—and it’s not just the bass. Rather, it’s the union of the three stringed instruments nakedly chugging in unison atop the drums, without the addition of a rhythm guitar track to “fill out the sound”; good recordings of smartly written parts don’t need them.
Unfortunately, the part is over as quickly as it began. Fortunately, it is followed by the sort of wah-wah freakout guitar solos that Kirk Hammett was created to perform. And it is worth noting that this one is so pervasive and unwavering in its staccato that it could just as easily be utterly stupid if it wasn’t so fucking awesome and hilarious.
After a good, let’s say two-minute run, Hetfield decides to ruin the song again, this time swooning all snake charmer-like through a vocoder. (You know, those things that made Cher’s voice in Believe and Sean Kingston’s in Beautiful Girls sound all like they came from outer space.) Though its presence is fairly subtle or, rather, about as subtle as a vocoder is capable of being, Hetfield’s lyrics and vocal melody are not.
At this point in the song, I would not think it unreasonable to hide your face in your hands out of embarrassment, or uncommon to suffer from a stomachache.
This agenda of this silliness is forwarded, purportedly, so the music can swell and plod along clumsily when Hetfield bellows: "The slave becomes the master!" The line defies logic in the context of the song; it’s like an assignment that would earn a C- in Aggression Writing 101.
Broken, Beat & Scarred is probably the best, and most original, song here. Rolling Stone has already pegged it as a “likely fan favorite,” robbing me of my sense of discovery, but that doesn't diminish its impact. Lyrically and melodically, Hetfield employs a structure perhaps best described as round-like, suggesting a sort-of Row Your Boat about sadism. Something about the repetition of the words, and the brute-force employment of the phrase “what don’t kill you make you more strong” works magically; as does the psychotic Greek chorus, headed up by Hetfield, muttering “show your scars,” its collective teeth gritted. The song only goes to good places, nicely thrashing about, when it stomps up the stairs .
Given its subject matter; it might just be about Rocky Balboa!
The Day That Never Comes starts with the kind of atmospheric, dreamily processed guitar you would normally find populating the records of The Brother Kite or Explosions in the Sky these days before segueing into a very familiar Metallica construct, leaving any alternative interpretations to burn faintly in the distance. Kirk Hammett lunges little guitar squiggles over the precision and simplicity of Ulrich’s drum accents, this time relegated to single snare hits and bass, and this time played by Robert Trujillo. It’s an incredibly comfortable and familiar precision—though it’s really only been executed One time previously—and it is a convention that serves its inventors quite well. The guitar line to the verse sounds an awful lot like a few-notes-short version of the guitar line to the verse of Fade To Black. The chorus soars with dread, with Hetfield’s put-on affectations just barely saved by Hammet’s symphonic guitar harmonies and Ulrich’s aptly ludicrous tom rolls.
But when all the instrumentation gallops to a pause, there’s nothing and no one to bail out Hetfield when he claims "No the son shine never comes" with a subtlety approximate to that of Randy “Muscle Man” Savage imploring you to snap into a Slim Jim, and elicits the same instinctual head-shaking and involuntary forced-air-through-nose laughter.
Such sentiments return when, after about a 30-second instrumental break (nothing really special), Hetfield returns to the mic to profess:
The final three minutes of The Day That Never Comes are nearly all that one could hope for musically in this type of Metallica song. It speeds up, has nice little tricky, yet melodic guitar noodles and concusive drumming, and after about a minute of these final three minutes, Metallica’s guitars start to hammer-out a hammered-on progression that ranks, musically, alongside the best of Metallica. It sounds familiar and new at the same time—the first and, alas, last such moment on Death Magnetic. But it’s thrilling while it lasts.
All Nightmare Long starts off sounding as if could be an outtake from The Black Album before opting for a more obtuse, raging old-school thrash metal onslaught, letting up for a second to let Hetfield gurgle one, two in very classic Metallica fashion. The structure of All Nightmare Long is pretty bizarre—even as it jumps all over the place, Hetfield keeps things together with his vocals, and employs them to convincing effect in the fist-pumping anthem of a chorus. It’s big and dumb but, at least this time, who’s complaining?
Cyanide, like most of the songs on Death Magnetic is a mixed bag, but this one is particularly heavy on the tricks and light on the treats. It starts out with a mildly interesting interplay between: the shotgun kickback of snare and guitar chords; and the pellet spray of cymbals and, again, Hammet’s explosive wah-wah. Then, everything halts, and Metallica, for the first time, sounds like a second-rate (is there any other kind?) bar band, as the drums and bass bounce around unremarkably, until the guitars come in to save them, but instead wind up sounding like—bad, early Stone Temple Pilots?
The chorus is engaging enough, and has a kind of interesting rhythm relative to its melody; I’m found myself humming it when I’m too tired to know better. The mid-section of Cyanide offers the most embarrassing moment of any Metallica record or song to date, where Hetfield wonders: “Say is that rain or are they tears?”
This line has also relentlessly haunted me: it’s so grammatically, I don’t know, fucked up, but I can’t figure out how to fix it, given the amount of syllables allotted by its context in the song. Say is that rain or is it tears? Nope.
The Unforgiven III might have been funny, if it weren’t so depressing.
I’m not too familiar with the Unforgivens I or II, but my fellow ’80s-Metallica brother-in-arms Jeff (though he’s no fan) has assured me that there’s some sort of narrative to The Unforgiven, where Hetfield sings of the third-person him, which turns out to be him or the first-person Hetfield. Surprise!
That certainly seems to be the case here. I think that Hetfield envisioned The Unforgiven III as some sort of romanticism-in-suffering version of sea chantey or something, rather than the lamely conceived, loosely connected series of clichés it ultimately is. Though, musically, it has a few minimally interesting parts (and plenty of unbearable ones) and, certainly, the chorus is super-catchy, Hetfield’s maritime metaphor gives birth to the self-parody of a self-pitying sea captain, and it’s embarrassing to the core:
The Unforgiven III does offer one essential moment: when Hetfield talks of the search for seas of gold, it’s good fun to imagine him saying, search for Caesar’s ghost.
The Judas Kiss bashes around pretty amiably for about eight minutes, and commits no real offense except for its really boring chorus—but is rarely exciting either.
The instrumental Suicide and Redemption should, by all means, be fantastic. No ridiculous lyrics to contend with, and, like the fantastic slow creeper To Live is to Die from ...And Justice for All, it’s paced slow and pitched low, and runs for about ten minutes. But the bend-it then chunk-it riff at the core of Suicide and Redemption is the least interesting part of it, which is unfortunate because, as these sorts of things go, they have to keep coming back to it. Still it has some quite nice stretches—some of the best of them having as much to do with Black Sabbath as Metallica.
My Apocalypse is the album's closer, and any fan of Puppets or Justice knows what that means: it’s Damage, Inc. and Dyer’s Eve time, where Metallica places that one song so fast and so aggressive, they wouldn’t deign to attempt to play it live. In the context of Death Magnetic, My Apocalypse serves this purpose better than anyone has the right to expect. It’s pretty fucking fast, and Hetfield is up to his old tricks again, yelling threats like “Fear my name extermination” and “Demon awaken my apocalypse,” and it’s pretty nice.
But My Apocalypse feels more like a jumping off, rather than a winding up, point. Maybe Metallica feels the same way: though it is the last song on Death Magnetic, its lyrics are inexplicably printed first in the liner notes.
My Apocalypse and the whole of Death Magnetic comes off as neither scary nor dangerous ( maybe a little bit kickass) but, rather, as thoroughly deliberate and reeks of desperation. It's as if Hetfield & Co. painted themselves into a corner of shittery, and they're trying to claw their way out, but are unable (or unwilling?) to stymie the tendencies that derailed them in the first place.
That it is unquestionably the best thing Metallica has managed to produce in the last 20 years has at least as much to do with the poor quality of its output during that time being complete nonsense as it does with the quality of Death Magnetic.
And what’s with that title—Death Magnetic? It reads the same as if you went into a diner and saw cheese grilled on the menu.
It’s as if they think, utterly wrong-headedly, that with the proper application per square inch of intent and brute force, they can just turn things around, and no one will be the wiser.
Death Magnetic kicks off with That Was Just Your Life, its reverb-drenched, cascading guitar picking sounding more than a little bit like those which define the calm-before-the-storm in many a metal-era Suicidal Tendencies exercise. You half-expect one of Rocky George’s sweetly dissonant guitar leads to come-a-weeping, or hear Mike Muir chime in with: what the hell’s going on around here?
The galloping guitar propelling That Was Just Your Life is quite comforting and sad, really—like running into an old friend at a funeral. It kind of sounds like old Metallica. Ulrich’s double kick, though played with perfect precision, is such an oddity that it sounds like he’s merely proving he can still do it. Though Rick Rubin's production is similar in some ways to ...And Justice for All, it sounds decidedly more overdriven. And the cymbals on the bridge sound as if they were mic’d up and compressed by Dave Fridmann in an attempt to best the oversaturation of Sleater-Kinney’s excellent swansong The Woods.
Death Magnetic sounds like no other Metallica record, and sounds like them all.
When Hetfield extends the word die to diyyeeeeeaah! to conclude the verse, he sounds a little more than a lot like his former self. But the song works better when Hetfield keeps his mouth shut—his affectations often sound forced, a product of the same determination and discipline that negotiated his sobriety. And his lyrics are a constant reminder of the new Metallica trying to inhabit old Metallica space. Now, when Hetfield scowls, it’s clear that his loyalties have changed:
Like a general without a missionUsed to be Metallica identified more with the infantry soldiers than the higher-ups. It was all about rising up and lashing out, not strategizing the next phase of the battle. It is a pronounced difference, diminishing the scope and effect of the music.
Until the war will start again
The End of the Line starts out promising enough, with some tricky time signatures rolling out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by some steam-rolled palm muting. Then it quickly devolves into some sort of blunter, less-nuanced version of the verses of Pearl Jam’s Even Flow, which is, itself, neither particularly subtle nor nuanced. The song manages to get back on track for the verse before insisting on repeating that goddamned bridge again.
There’s uncompromising delight in hearing James Hetfield spit out sinister word associations like Choke! Asphyxia!, that is, until it becomes apparent that he’s talking about the rigors of being a spotlight-hungry celebrity. It's as if he's the Ghost of Christmas Future coming to say, meet your maker, Paris Hilton.
Still, repeated listenings to that palm-muted verse could cause quite the strain on the muscles in the hinge of your neck, especially if yours are as out-of-practice and creaky as mine.
After the chorus, Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield masterfully harmonize their chunked-out guitar runs as if they were playing aural BATTLESHIP with Iron Maiden. And, wait a second—is that bass I hear? Wow. Here, Rubin negotiates something, literally, unheard of in most Metallica records—and it’s not just the bass. Rather, it’s the union of the three stringed instruments nakedly chugging in unison atop the drums, without the addition of a rhythm guitar track to “fill out the sound”; good recordings of smartly written parts don’t need them.
Unfortunately, the part is over as quickly as it began. Fortunately, it is followed by the sort of wah-wah freakout guitar solos that Kirk Hammett was created to perform. And it is worth noting that this one is so pervasive and unwavering in its staccato that it could just as easily be utterly stupid if it wasn’t so fucking awesome and hilarious.
After a good, let’s say two-minute run, Hetfield decides to ruin the song again, this time swooning all snake charmer-like through a vocoder. (You know, those things that made Cher’s voice in Believe and Sean Kingston’s in Beautiful Girls sound all like they came from outer space.) Though its presence is fairly subtle or, rather, about as subtle as a vocoder is capable of being, Hetfield’s lyrics and vocal melody are not.
At this point in the song, I would not think it unreasonable to hide your face in your hands out of embarrassment, or uncommon to suffer from a stomachache.
This agenda of this silliness is forwarded, purportedly, so the music can swell and plod along clumsily when Hetfield bellows: "The slave becomes the master!" The line defies logic in the context of the song; it’s like an assignment that would earn a C- in Aggression Writing 101.
Broken, Beat & Scarred is probably the best, and most original, song here. Rolling Stone has already pegged it as a “likely fan favorite,” robbing me of my sense of discovery, but that doesn't diminish its impact. Lyrically and melodically, Hetfield employs a structure perhaps best described as round-like, suggesting a sort-of Row Your Boat about sadism. Something about the repetition of the words, and the brute-force employment of the phrase “what don’t kill you make you more strong” works magically; as does the psychotic Greek chorus, headed up by Hetfield, muttering “show your scars,” its collective teeth gritted. The song only goes to good places, nicely thrashing about, when it stomps up the stairs .
Given its subject matter; it might just be about Rocky Balboa!
The Day That Never Comes starts with the kind of atmospheric, dreamily processed guitar you would normally find populating the records of The Brother Kite or Explosions in the Sky these days before segueing into a very familiar Metallica construct, leaving any alternative interpretations to burn faintly in the distance. Kirk Hammett lunges little guitar squiggles over the precision and simplicity of Ulrich’s drum accents, this time relegated to single snare hits and bass, and this time played by Robert Trujillo. It’s an incredibly comfortable and familiar precision—though it’s really only been executed One time previously—and it is a convention that serves its inventors quite well. The guitar line to the verse sounds an awful lot like a few-notes-short version of the guitar line to the verse of Fade To Black. The chorus soars with dread, with Hetfield’s put-on affectations just barely saved by Hammet’s symphonic guitar harmonies and Ulrich’s aptly ludicrous tom rolls.
But when all the instrumentation gallops to a pause, there’s nothing and no one to bail out Hetfield when he claims "No the son shine never comes" with a subtlety approximate to that of Randy “Muscle Man” Savage imploring you to snap into a Slim Jim, and elicits the same instinctual head-shaking and involuntary forced-air-through-nose laughter.
Such sentiments return when, after about a 30-second instrumental break (nothing really special), Hetfield returns to the mic to profess:
Love is a four-letter wordWow. Not sure if Hetfield was really trying to invoke prison love and all that entails when he wrote this, but it is commonly thought that in prison, love is a four-letter word, indeed.
And never spoken here
Love is a four-letter word
Here in this prison
The final three minutes of The Day That Never Comes are nearly all that one could hope for musically in this type of Metallica song. It speeds up, has nice little tricky, yet melodic guitar noodles and concusive drumming, and after about a minute of these final three minutes, Metallica’s guitars start to hammer-out a hammered-on progression that ranks, musically, alongside the best of Metallica. It sounds familiar and new at the same time—the first and, alas, last such moment on Death Magnetic. But it’s thrilling while it lasts.
All Nightmare Long starts off sounding as if could be an outtake from The Black Album before opting for a more obtuse, raging old-school thrash metal onslaught, letting up for a second to let Hetfield gurgle one, two in very classic Metallica fashion. The structure of All Nightmare Long is pretty bizarre—even as it jumps all over the place, Hetfield keeps things together with his vocals, and employs them to convincing effect in the fist-pumping anthem of a chorus. It’s big and dumb but, at least this time, who’s complaining?
Cyanide, like most of the songs on Death Magnetic is a mixed bag, but this one is particularly heavy on the tricks and light on the treats. It starts out with a mildly interesting interplay between: the shotgun kickback of snare and guitar chords; and the pellet spray of cymbals and, again, Hammet’s explosive wah-wah. Then, everything halts, and Metallica, for the first time, sounds like a second-rate (is there any other kind?) bar band, as the drums and bass bounce around unremarkably, until the guitars come in to save them, but instead wind up sounding like—bad, early Stone Temple Pilots?
The chorus is engaging enough, and has a kind of interesting rhythm relative to its melody; I’m found myself humming it when I’m too tired to know better. The mid-section of Cyanide offers the most embarrassing moment of any Metallica record or song to date, where Hetfield wonders: “Say is that rain or are they tears?”
This line has also relentlessly haunted me: it’s so grammatically, I don’t know, fucked up, but I can’t figure out how to fix it, given the amount of syllables allotted by its context in the song. Say is that rain or is it tears? Nope.
The Unforgiven III might have been funny, if it weren’t so depressing.
I’m not too familiar with the Unforgivens I or II, but my fellow ’80s-Metallica brother-in-arms Jeff (though he’s no fan) has assured me that there’s some sort of narrative to The Unforgiven, where Hetfield sings of the third-person him, which turns out to be him or the first-person Hetfield. Surprise!
That certainly seems to be the case here. I think that Hetfield envisioned The Unforgiven III as some sort of romanticism-in-suffering version of sea chantey or something, rather than the lamely conceived, loosely connected series of clichés it ultimately is. Though, musically, it has a few minimally interesting parts (and plenty of unbearable ones) and, certainly, the chorus is super-catchy, Hetfield’s maritime metaphor gives birth to the self-parody of a self-pitying sea captain, and it’s embarrassing to the core:
He’s run agroundUh-huh. And so Hetfield sinks with this one, bringing everybody aboard (including you) with him. Surely, one amongst them knows that The Unforgiven III is pretentious, childish drivel. Is there no one in the band willing to stand up to the mighty (on the outside, inside he's crying) sea captain? Or are they each so full of contempt for him that they relish the thought of his embarrassing himself?
Like his life
In water much too shallow
Slipping fast
Down with his ship
The Unforgiven III does offer one essential moment: when Hetfield talks of the search for seas of gold, it’s good fun to imagine him saying, search for Caesar’s ghost.
The Judas Kiss bashes around pretty amiably for about eight minutes, and commits no real offense except for its really boring chorus—but is rarely exciting either.
The instrumental Suicide and Redemption should, by all means, be fantastic. No ridiculous lyrics to contend with, and, like the fantastic slow creeper To Live is to Die from ...And Justice for All, it’s paced slow and pitched low, and runs for about ten minutes. But the bend-it then chunk-it riff at the core of Suicide and Redemption is the least interesting part of it, which is unfortunate because, as these sorts of things go, they have to keep coming back to it. Still it has some quite nice stretches—some of the best of them having as much to do with Black Sabbath as Metallica.
My Apocalypse is the album's closer, and any fan of Puppets or Justice knows what that means: it’s Damage, Inc. and Dyer’s Eve time, where Metallica places that one song so fast and so aggressive, they wouldn’t deign to attempt to play it live. In the context of Death Magnetic, My Apocalypse serves this purpose better than anyone has the right to expect. It’s pretty fucking fast, and Hetfield is up to his old tricks again, yelling threats like “Fear my name extermination” and “Demon awaken my apocalypse,” and it’s pretty nice.
But My Apocalypse feels more like a jumping off, rather than a winding up, point. Maybe Metallica feels the same way: though it is the last song on Death Magnetic, its lyrics are inexplicably printed first in the liner notes.
My Apocalypse and the whole of Death Magnetic comes off as neither scary nor dangerous ( maybe a little bit kickass) but, rather, as thoroughly deliberate and reeks of desperation. It's as if Hetfield & Co. painted themselves into a corner of shittery, and they're trying to claw their way out, but are unable (or unwilling?) to stymie the tendencies that derailed them in the first place.
That it is unquestionably the best thing Metallica has managed to produce in the last 20 years has at least as much to do with the poor quality of its output during that time being complete nonsense as it does with the quality of Death Magnetic.
And what’s with that title—Death Magnetic? It reads the same as if you went into a diner and saw cheese grilled on the menu.
It’s as if they think, utterly wrong-headedly, that with the proper application per square inch of intent and brute force, they can just turn things around, and no one will be the wiser.
2 comments:
You're not a Metallica fan, you're a heavy metal fan. You can't expect a band not to change over a quarter of a century. If they had put out "Master Of Puppets" again, you still would have trashed it. At least you did it with half-assed eloquence.
Well for me Metallica took the easiest rode by going commercial since the black album they were like ads of Generic Viagra, its all about selling. DOnt get me wrong I love Metallica, but only the first records.
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