Last night I picked up Metallica's new album Death Magnetic. Buying Metallica albums had become a somewhat anxious event since Load back in the mid-90s. The good news is that the band was constantly trying something new. They refused to sit on their well deserved laurels and just spit out the same old stuff over and over again. But metal fans are not particularly noted for embracing change and so a backlash started forming against the band. Personally, the changes never bothered me much. What turns me on more than anything in any form of art is creativity. I'm most impressed by those who keep trying to find something new and different. Repeating the same stuff over and over again bores me. So what Metallica was doing wasn't grating on my nerves the way it did many of their fans.
But even I was more than a little rattled by the documentary Some Kind of Monster. It's a brilliant movie. I can't rave enough about it as film making. As a fan of Metallica though, it was traumatizing. Watching lead singer James Hetfield head into rehab and then come out and try to connect again with the band was tough to watch. Worse was the therapist they brought in to help the entire band get along again. It just wasn't metal. The movie documents the making of their last album St. Anger. Again, I liked it better than most. But I go back and forth on how much I like it, largely based on mood. The album is like setting therapy sessions to metal. Sometimes it works for me and other times it annoys the hell out of me.
Around that time I finally managed to see the band live for the first time. Previously they had always rumbled through my area when I was either dead broke or locked into some other event that I couldn't escape from. I went whole hog for the concert, getting a floor pass, which meant no seat and a constant fight for position during the entire concert. Leaving that concert, I knew two things. One, Metallica was still great in concert, no matter how screwed up in the head they had become. And two, I was two old for mosh pits. Next time I'll get an actual seat and save the fighting for younger kids.
Recently I downloaded the singles My Apocalypse and Cyanide from iTunes and quickly fell madly in love with them. As accepting as I was of Metallica's steady change over the years, at that moment I realized just how much I missed the aggressive thrash sound of their early albums. Last night I picked up the rest of the album and remembered clearly why this is my favorite band. This album is the fastest and most aggressive they've made in nearly two decades but it contains the complexity and refinement they developed since then, making this a startlingly satisfying album. The first song, That Was Just Your Life, starts slowly and ominously and then kicks into a higher gear. And as fast as that is, it later finds an even higher gear that has me just about giddy. When I write, I pretty much always put headphones on and blast my ears with metal. After a few songs, the music almost disappears from me. It creates a wall that pushes the outside world away so I can think clearly. It may sound strange to use loud noise to create peace but it works for me. This song however, barges back into my personal space and demands I actually listen to it. About five minutes in it accelerates with Kirk Hammett's solo and becomes impossible to ignore. I'm listening to it right now and it makes it damn near impossible to write. The constantly shifting texture of the song keeps grabbing my attention, charging breakneck forward with an energy that grabs me and takes over.
Reviewing music is not something I do, so this feels really awkward to write. I just don't have the vocabulary for it. But the album makes me so ridiculously happy that there was no alternative but to write about it. The irony is that I named this column/blog for the book Psychotic Reactions that collected the works of the great rock critic Lester Bangs. It's kind of embarassing to do that and find myself unable to write lucidly about rock music. Luckily, being dead, Bangs can't be insulted by that. But he was someone who wrote from a massive passion and love of music, so he would probably understand my writing this particular piece from that same position. Metallica's Death Magnetic is relentlessly aggressive thrash metal and the best thing they have done in a long time. Its long loud songs aren't radio friendly so don't expect to hear these songs there much. But if you dig on serious quality metal, go buy the damn thing now. Don't argue with me. Just do it.
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