#1 – New Metallica album: Don’t bother, which is sad because I really had such high hopes. Rick Rubin produced it, so it should have blown my socks off. In reality, not so much. The Dethalbum rocks much harder and if the two were to meet, Death Magnetic would put its figurative tail between its figurative legs and scurry away.
#2 – This is it for me today. Heavy damage is being taken at the RNS Tacoma Blogstation and it is going to take me all morning to fix it.
See you tomorrow.
Even if the music was good (which it isn’t), it is so badly mixed and mastered as to be actually painful to listen to.
Metallica has blown for a while. Nowadays I only listen to pre-Black Album Metallica. I loved the Black Album when it came out, but feel that it has little staying power. One could also make the point that I listened to it too much when I was 15, but the same could be said for a lot of albums that I still enjoy.
Their efforts post Black Album have been super hit and miss, almost entirely in the “miss” category. St. Anger had one good song on it, and the rest were TERRIBLE. The tracks I’ve heard from Death Magnetic have been truly awful.
In summary – Metallica would not be selling these albums, nor would any label pick them up, had it not been for their ’80s and early ’90s output that built a huge fan base. It’s sort of like the Rolling Stones – they have consistently put out terrible albums so that they could have an excuse to tour and play their classics. Of course, I am one of those guys that things that “Paint it Black” was their best song, and that was recorded 33 years ago.