Metallica - Death Magnetic

Metallica refuses to leave you alone. As decent Americans it's really your duty to buy their new record. You have to pay for it too...no illegal downloads allowed. Lars Ulrich will come to your house and batter your face with his double bass pedal. The same one that's been sitting in his closet for the past 20 years. It would appear that the West Coast thrashers -gone chart toppers -gone really awful "southern" rock-gone insecure old man/trash can metal have come full circle with their latest release Death Magnetic. It would also appear that the last sentence was a total train wreck, much like every Metallica record released since 1988. I've given the new record one listen all the way through and I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. The gang is back! Well, sorta. This is the first album to feature new bassist Robert Trujillo, who joined the band in 2003. He's a really solid player and pretty technically efficient, but his sound is buried under incredibly beefy guitars and the weirdest cymbal mix I've heard in a while. Who better to produce this iconic American Metal record than the new last resort for failed musicians to revive their careers, Rick Rubin. An obvious but welcome choice, Rubin does a great job of keeping these geezers sounding fresh. The vocals are mixed very low, so as not to contaminate any solid riffs with James Hetfield's redundant, trite, juvenile lyrics. The shortest song on this record, "My Apocalypse" is five minutes long. The longest, an instrumental called "Suicide and Redemption" is ten minutes. After my first listen, these two tracks and the opener, "That Was Just Your Life" are the best. The overall "Metallica's still got it" vibe is very obvious here. Kirk Hammet is making up for lost time, playing excellently on this album and giving fans a healthy dose of top shelf shredding(much needed after 2003's solo-less and shitty St. Anger). A concentrated effort has been made to keep things moving fast, and though there are echoes of past failings throughout (some breakdowns reek of "Reload" trashiness), the Metal is back and, for the most part, still in the eye of the beholder.