Death Magnetic

First impression: It's distorted. To the point of distraction. After Metallica's last joke of an album which sounded like it was recorded on an old Radio Shack cassette player, I thought this was going to be yet another $16 wasted. It doesn't help when I'm told by Lars to just deal with it.

Yeah, well... shut the fuck up, Lars. Forgive me, I'm not a professional recording engineer, but I'm fairly certain that no professional recording should ever look like this:


That said... the more I listen to this album, the more I'm inclined to proclaim it to be Metallica's best. Ever. It not only has balls, but big hairy ones. The material is, pound for pound, the best work they've ever produced; they took all of their improved songwriting skills developed since, say, the Black Album, removed the pop-ish overproduction that Bob Rock introduced in order to make them marketable, then added a double helping of the Master of Puppets rawness that the band had prior to the Rock era. Even the distortion sounds like it belongs there now -- I almost miss it when I listen to Black or Master. Almost. I can't help but wonder whether the balls would still be there if they backed off on the levels by a dozen dB or two.

Being ever the optimist, I decided to give St. Anger another listen to see if it, too, has grown on me.

Nope. It still sucks.

Labels: Music

posted by Paul @ 12:04 PM