Glorious Noise's Todd Totale breaks down Metallica's most recent, Death Magnetic, and it ain't pretty:
"I’ve firmly believed ever since The Black Album, the spirit of Metallica is no longer with us. The late Cliff Burton seemed to embody the idea that it was the band’s responsibility to test themselves before anything else and he also seemed to be the voice of reason that the band ultimately needed, and spent the better part of two decades trying to find again. After he was so callously taken, the burden of running Metallica was shared by a pair of drunks with major communication issues and a guitar player who seems incapable of any form of confrontation unless he’s plugged in to an amplifier."
"There is no spirit…anywhere…on Death Magnetic. It is as by the numbers as anything the band has done in the past twenty years and it demonstrates that the band, specifically James Hetfield, has actually reached a point where he thinks that returning to the type of music that made them so legendary means that he needs to dumb down his lyrics. Words are thrown together with phonetic abandon, totally disregarding their meaning while gaining inclusion on the sheer merits that they sound gnarly. "
Ouch.
We're not as harsh on Death Magnetic as Todd is--we like it, kinda--but we're reminded of something once written about another mega band trying to capture the sound of past glories:
"As one song segues into the next, it feels like [Robert] Smith is striving to make a classic Cure record, putting all the sounds in place before he constructs the actual songs. That makes for a good listening experience, especially for fans of Disintegration, but it never catches hold the way that record did, for two simple reasons: there isn't enough variation between the songs for them to distinguish themselves, nor are there are enough sonic details to give individual tracks character." - AMG's Stephen Thomas Erlewine on The Cure's Bloodflowers album.
Read the rest of the Todd Totale's Death Magnetic review here.
