Spilling blood and bleeding gas

[For the record, Bryan, I'd started a draft of this before you posted your blog, so I'm not trying to crib your ideas, I promise!  :) ]

If you've read The Lord of the Rings, you're more patient than I am. I only saw the movies.  Also, you're a nerd.  

Either way, you'll recall a character names Grima Wormtongue. In the character's Wiki entry, he is described as a "flatterer, liar, and manipulator" who "worked to weaken Théoden and his kingdom through lies and persuasion".  Had the LoTR movies been a mob movie, he would have been the Godfather's consiglieri, but rather than dispensing good advice,  Wormtongue used his influence to turn a good man to evil.

At the side of Theoden, Wormtongue weakened the King and clouded his judgment.  At long last, "When the wizard (Gandalf) revealed Wormtongue for what he was, Théoden returned to his senses" and ruled with the bravery and goodness that his followers knew was still in his heart, buried somewhere deep within.

Ladies and gentlemen, I offer to you that Bob Rock is the real-life Grima Wormtongue, Rick Rubin is Gandalf (if the beard fits ...), and Metallica is King Theoden.

Bob Rock, having ruined Metallica for the last 17 years or so by offering advice that was horrible on a personal level and even worse on a musical one (If you've seen Some Kind of Monster, you know what I mean; if you haven't, go rent it.  It almost out-Spinal Tap's Spinal Tap.) has been jetisoned in favor of Rick Rubin.  

This is the equivalent of when Tom Brady decided to ditch Tara Reid and ended up with Gisele Bundchen.  Sometimes the upgrade is so great, you can't believe the first choice was even an option in the first place.

To say that Rubin's work is wizardly on the new Metallica record, Death Magnetic, would be an understatement.  In fact, "whiz" is a descendant of the word "wizard", and Rubin is widely considered to be a "whiz" at re-inventing or re-energizing musicians whose careers seemed to have been on the decline, or at least less relevant than they had been previously.  

To fans (like me) old enough to remember what the band was like pre-"Black Album", he has made Metallica vital again.  The music is thoroughly re-energized, focused, fast, and - yes - heavy.  Death Magnetic is easily Metallica's best record in the last twenty years.  TWENTY YEARS, people.  We're old.  Dammit.

The sound is akin to that on  ... And Justice For All; the rhythm guitar chugs along with the evil galloping menace that the more recent Metallica records lacked.  For a while there, it seemed like the band forgot how to ride a galloping low E string.  But it's back here, bigtime, as are Kirk Hammet's scorching guitar solos.  Not allowed to play any on the previous record, he's making up for lost time here.  Seven of the ten songs are more than seven minutes long.  None is less than five minutes long.  Like the older Metallica records, each song is jam-packed with tempo changes and handful upon handful of riffs.  It's just like old times.

(In fact, I'd love to see if Rubin could re-master a re-release of Justice, which always sounded too crowded and muddy to me - there's a lot of great stuff in there, but it gets lost in the mix.)

And you know what's missing?  That awful clanging drum from St. Anger.  Gone, baby, gone.  Lars Ulrich may be one of metal's least popular personalities, but he reminds everyone that he's not just Lars Ulrich, he's Lars Ulrich DAMMIT.  It almost makes you forget what a screwball he seems to be in real life.  (Almost.)

Jim Hetfield is still prone to writing some really awkward verses here and there, but nothing is as awful as pure garbage like "Sweet Amber" on St. Anger, for instance (though, frankly, it's unlikely anything could be).  

But there's plenty here to like.  More than like.  This is devil horn fist in the air type stuff.  

The opening track, "That Was Just Your Life", opens with the sound of a heartbeat - appropriately symbolic of a band trying to prove that it still has some life in it.  The guitar enters with a shimmering phasor effect, and it feels like when you're on the way up the first slope of a rollercoaster.  You know you're going to start moving really fast, really soon.  Will it be fun?  Will everyone enjoy the ride and want to tell their friends they need to go on it?  Yes and yes.

The drums kick in, the overdrive switches on, and that old familiar snarling staccato vocal delivery digs its claws in.  As my good friend Bryan rhetorically asks aloud in his own blog, "There.  Was that so hard?"

Track #3, "Broken, Beat, and Scarred" is, at "only" 6:30 long, a likely radio release.  

Track #4, "The Day That Never Comes", is the first to have been released to fans via the Metallica website.  The first couple of times I heard it, I was as wary as Bryan regarding the rest of the album. For the first five minutes, it's as close to the Bob Rock era as the album comes.  It sounds like it's trying too hard to be radio friendly, and the vocals aren't as confident as they are on the rest of the album.  It's Hetfield singing again, not barking the way he's at his best.  And the lyrics are pretty forgettable ("when you stand up and feel the warmth, but the sunshine never comes").   The final three minutes, though, had me scratching my head - did they play like that because they meant it, or because they thought it was what people wanted to hear?  It sounded like old Metallica, but were they just throwing it in as a treat to their older fans?

Turns out they meant it.

Track #5, "All Nightmare Long", will probably be the biggest hit on the record.  It's got the perfect mix of the old Metallica songwriting style with the radio-friendly chorus of the more recent records.  It's another eight minute long locomotive barreling down the tracks.

Bryan picked up on the Ennio Morricone vibe in "Unforgiven 3", too.  Though it shares its name with two predecessors, it doesn't share the same melody or chorus.  Metallica had recorded mostly-instrumental cover of "The Ecstasy of Gold" on a tribute record a while back - if you've seen The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, you'll recognize it as the song that plays toward the climax of the movie as Tuco runs through the cemetery trying to find Arch Stanton's grave.  The similarities between that song and "U3" are subtle but undeniable.  Hell, sometimes they're not subtle.  Hetfield uses the word "gold" quite often in the new track and seems to begging for the comparison.

Two side notes: 

1. I always wondered about how bands name songs.  If a band writes something called "The Happy Song", and then on the next record they write another song that would have been more appropriately named "The Happy Song" than the first one, could they retro-actively re-name the first?  Metallica has three "Unforgivens".  Iron Maiden has a song called "Wicker Man", but so did Bruce Dickinson (their lead singer) on one of his solo records.  I don't know.  It's just kinda weird.

2. Just in case you haven't seen The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly and want to avoid a spoiler, skip the rest of this paragraph.  Stop reading now.  You've been warned.  A couple of times.  OK, I'm going to spoil it now.  Ready?  Look away.  -- During the standoff at the end of the movie, wouldn't it have been better for Blondie to have decided Tuco's fate depending on what Tuco did when he drew his (ammunitionless) gun?  They should have somehow made it clear that had Tuco drawn his weapon on Angel Eyes, Blondie would have spared him, but if he drew on Blondie, Blondie would have killed him despite their history.  The only change I would have made to a wonderful movie.

Track #8, "The Judas Kiss", would have fit perfectly onto Justice.  

Track #9, "Suicide and Redemption", is a welcome old friend: the ten-minute instrumental.  

Track #10, "My Apocalypse": Kirk Hammett's solo at 2:25.  Ooh, baby.

So yeah -- get it.  Don't just download it.  Regardless of their previous stance on pirated music and how it might be perceived that they treated their fans, you have to support art when you appreciate it.

It took a long time to be able to say this and mean it:  Metallica has given us a gift this year.  This is great stuff.  Really, really great stuff.  

Go check it out.