Death Magnetic (Metallica, 2008)

Damn you, Metallica. It took over 20 years, but you've finally won me back and this was the album that did it. When my friends first started getting me into metal, the first albums I rushed out to get were your first four. I remember defending James Hetfield's vocal style against those who dismissed it as just shouting and screaming, then I was astonished when these same people rushed out in droves to buy Metallica (The Black Album) and proclaimed themselves fans. In hindsight that was actually a pretty good album, yet young me felt betrayed by the band, like I wasn't the kind of fan they wanted, so they eased up on the heaviness, sweetened up the vocals, and watched the money pour in.

Just when I was about to accept that the Black Album was just a sign of the times, that Metallica was just moving into the 1990's, they doubled and tripled down on crazy with Load and Reload, as if they were trying to tell the world that the "metal" in their name was aluminum or some equally lightweight material. Throughout college and most of my adult life I announced the band in its current form was dead to me, dead since 1989 or so.

Things got interesting with St. Anger. Sort of like And Justice For All it was a "therapy" album, although this time nobody had died (unless you count Jason Newsted's reputation among his ex-bandmates). The production was rough and there was a lot of rawness in it. But instead of making me want to forgive Metallica, it made me want to laugh at them, like I was watching a band tear apart everything that made them so famous over the course of the 1990's. They looked like a bunch of self-obsessed morons in their Some Kind of Monster documentary. They were still dead to me.

Thankfully the band itself took stock of their own situation and finally (FINALLY) got down to business. Death Magnetic (in my book) is the true successor album to their original "core four", as if their little detour through the 1990's had finally merged again with the metal superhighway they built in the 1980's. Now, to be fair, it's not a clone of an album like Master of Puppets, because they are in their 50's, not 20's, but it suppresses most of their softer elements (thank St. Anger for that!) and gets back to the thrash metal sound their pioneered, with the solos back in the mix (no thanks to St. Anger for that!).

Now, speaking of the mix, I know Rick Rubin has taken a lot of flak for hyper-compressing the sound. Believe me, it's not fun for my car speakers or my ears when a song from this album follows something mixed a lot cooler when I'm doing an iPod shuffle. On the other hand, it's not enough reason to consider the album a failure, plus the production is far better sounding than Justice or St. Anger. If I'm in a fault-finding mood, I would be more inclined to point to the band's tendency to release big bloated albums (75+ minutes) infrequently, rather than more concise and frequent albums. This album is already nearly six years in the past. However, unlike previous albums, I'm actually kind of looking forward to what is coming next. It feels so strange....