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What next. The great mystery which has pervaded every Metallica album
since Master Of Puppets.
Their last answer, the raw, combustive and underrated St Anger in retrospect hangs like a dirty
jacket in a large wardrobe. Opening the door five years on, Metallica may
afford it a glance, if only as a reminder before dusting off an older number
which hasn't been worn in a while but fits with firmness and comfortable
familiarity.
St Anger was of course not a happy time for Metallica. With Death
Magnetic, long time producer Bob Rock is gone. In his place is Rick Rubin,
and with that a return to service for Lars Ulrich's snare (no longer
sounding like he's walloping a pot), while Kirk Hammett gets the green light
to play solos again.
The production is thicker and more rounded, and what the Black Album
would sound like recorded in these times - a respectful nod back to Bob
Rock's finest moment from Rubin.
If St Anger's songs were the fruits of too many hangovers, fights and
sleepless nights, Death Magnetic, despite its morbid concept, picks over the
eight years from Kill 'Em All to the Black Album like a diary which
chronicled the period. Indeed, as That Was Your Life and The End Of The Line
canon the album to life you can't help but muse, this is
Metallica.
The Day That Never Comes winds its way round your ears like a son of One,
with the hegemony plain to see, right down to the classic styled solos that
trail up to big choruses and an epic climax.
All Nightmare Long's eight minutes could have cropped up on Ride The
Lightning with its thrashy, sloping octaves of tempo changes, balls to the
floor solos, double bass smatterings and ritual chugathons. It's a more
alluding sign too that instead of singing about staring into mirrors and out
of windows, James Hetfield is back to barking, snarling and growling verses
like "Hallucination, Heresy, Still you run, what's to come? What's
today?"
If the desire to read over pages of the past has somehow managed to miss
you by this point, The Unforgiven III effectively picks up the book and
chucks it at you face on.
Which brings us to the nub of what makes Death Magnetic such a resounding
success. Death Magnetic could have dropped 15 years ago and been a logical
conclusion to the Black album. Today, it emphatically brings Metallica full
circle to an intriguing afterthought: what next?
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