JimK:  Oh. My. God.  I never ever thought I would be writing this review for Death Magnetic.  Wait does that sound as much like a Penthouse Forum beginning as I think it does?  Screw it.  I’m so excited about this it may as well be a sexual experience.  This review comes with a preface that is much, much longer than the actual review, so be warned.

First off, my lifetime experience with Metallica is as follows: I grew up metal, evolving from my first Zeppelin record at age 5-ish to Sabbath, AC/DC, then Iron Maiden and so forth.  In my teens I was both a hair metal nut and a “dirty metal” lover.  See, dudes loved the hard shit.  Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer.  Oh my God Slayer.  But Metallica was the kind of heavy metal band that only comes along…well never.  They were an across the board favorite.  People (read, hot girls) that did not like heavy, aggressive metal liked Metallica.  People who loved heavy, agressive metal worshipped Metallica.

I toyed with the idea of actually, seriously writing a Metalli-Bible.  I had plans to emulate key points in the regular Bible.  The Book of Hetfield started “In the beginning, James created the heavy and the metal.  And the metal was without form; void….”  I think you get the point.  Sacrilegious, but I was fifteen and high as a kite most days.

I was also in what used to be called “reform school.”  A live-in school/dormitory/minimum security open-door facility for kids with…troubled histories and..uhh…complicated family lives. Ward of the state is the term I’m looking for.  Me, two hundred other testosterone-crazed mal-adjusted youths and easy access to drugs.  Needless to say I dove inward looking for something more than pot and the occasional booze supply to take the edge off, and that something turned out to be Metallica.

Kill ‘Em All was maybe the greatest thing I had ever heard.  Then they put out Ride The Lightning and my esteem rose.  Master of Puppets came out and I was a stone-cold Metalli-junkie.  See what I did there?  the “Metalli-” everything?  My little clique did that.  We were so obsessed with this band we actually labeled everything in the dorm one night with file folder labels and a Sharpie.  Metalli-lamp, Metalli-tv, Metalli-Marlboros…we stuck a Metalli-label on every item we could see until we ran out.  I lost Outs privileges (meaning no 4-hour trips out and about town unsupervised) for two weeks for that.  And it was worth it.

I had a boom box with detachable speakers.  When my brain went on overload and I wanted to kill someone, or worse have them kill me, I would detach the speakers, place them on either side of my pillow and put in my Master of Puppets tape.  See, we weren’t allowed to play music at a volume that could be heard down the hall.  If the prefects (guards) could hear it in the office at the head of the hall, then it was too loud.  This screwed guys with single rooms at the front of the long hallway, but I had a triple all the way at the end.  That meant more volume for me, but it still wasn’t enough.  I didn’t own headphones and had an income of precisely 10 bucks a week.  Out of that had to come my share of the weekly weed bag and also cigarette money.  Plus, I was young enough to think this was a reasonable solution and that my hearing would always be perfect.  So I would place the speakers on either side of my pillow and crank it.  Today I have a two-tone ringing in my ears that is so obtrusive I cannot stand silence.  I need some external noise on which to focus or the ringing can sometimes get to me.  BECAUSE OF MY LOVE FOR METALLICA.

That’s why I told you this story.  To spell out how much I loved this band.  I had a leather jacket on which I hand-sewed Metallica patches.  I have a sleeveless jean vest that went over it and I sported Metallica patches on the back, as was the style of us thrash/heavy metal lowlifes at the time.  We sort of fancied ourselves as junior outlaw bikers, I guess, and these patches were our club colors.  I toyed with the idea of a Metallica tattoo.  My first job they let me get?  I got it just to pay for Metallica tickets.  I was so deep into this band that I vowed that if I ever had a son, he would be named “James Clifford Kenefick.”  Not because my name is also James, but because James Hetfield was named James.  Can you fucking imagine?  When Cliff died I felt like my world was destroyed, and while I resented Jason Newsted at first, I came to appreciate him for salvaging my universe, and later came to see him for the relentless Metalli-machine he was.  He too loved the band, as a fan, and he poured his soul into it.  During my first steps out into adulthood with a job, a car and an apartment crawling with roaches, two cats and a girlfriend that used me to get away from her parents, And Justice For All exploded in my face like an atomic bomb, bringing us the last vestiges of arrangements and music written by Cliff, but played with an intensity that amazed everyone by Jason.  My respect for Newsted only increased my obsession with this band.  Years went by, and the Internet expanded my musical horizons.  From Metallica to Ministry to Nine Inch Nails to Die Warzau i discovered a whole host of industrial/IDM, which was running parallel to a growing obsession with Sub Pop stuff (like everyone else my age), but I never, ever forgot my boys from the Bay Area.  I loved the Black Album, although it was a departure from the thrash roots of the band.  It was a logical departure, a growing up while simplifying the sound just a little.  Unfortunately, that’s when things went from good to bad to worse to horrible.”

Metallica released Load in 1996.  What. The. Fuck?

Most of the regulars here know that I am best friends with a guy named Lee.  Lee and I were Nine Inch Nails fans who met online in the mid-90s.  We were also Metalli-nuts.  I remember getting Load on the same day he did, although that could be my memory playing tricks on me.  What I do remember clearly is the evening we spent on the phone talking about it.  Out of that conversation a website was born.  Alternica.  I cannot believe AOL still has it up.  We made that site in 1996.  Twelve years ago!  In fact, Load came out in June that year, and I doubt we waited more than a month or two to get that site up, so it’s been right around 12 years on the nose.  Go ahead.  Nose around the Alternica site.  Feel our distaste for what they turned themselves into.  We took it personally, as super-obsessed fans are wont to do.  However silly it seems now, we felt betrayed.

Reload made it worse, and St. Anger was a fucking joke.  A horrible album by anyone’s measure for any band.  They Newsted was ousted/quit and let it slip how fucked in the head these guys were, and eventually I thought to myself “Fuck it, all hope is lost for these guys.  At least I’ll always have the back catalog.”

I heard the rumors that Death Magnetic had leaked and I ignored them.  I heard they posted a couple songs on Myspace and I checked them out.  Hey…bad live mix, Hetfield’s vocals are so front and center I can hardly hear the music, but was that a straight-up thrash riff I heard?  One of those stuttering, monster speed riffs made so famous by the likes of Metallica and Megadeth?  Why, I think that sirs and madams, that is precisely what I heard!  Hope grew, smallish and weak, but alive and struggling above the dark earth of despair and dismissal.  I read that they got rid of Bob Rock and hired Rick Rubin.  My hope grew, feeding on the nutrients of what I knew about Rubin.  I read how he lectured the band to get in touch with their roots, and a tiny blossom appeared at the very top of my hope, and I knew I had to hear this for myself.

So I went looking, and lo and behold, a copy of Death Magnetic seemed to fall off a digital delivery truck and right into my hard drive.  I waited until the next day to test them out…I was in no hurry to be disappointed. Again.  Then the next day came and I needed to know, so i told my wife what I had and we prepared to give it a listen.  I know there is a shit-ton of words previous to this point, but I felt like I had to get you to understand the depth of my despair over Metallica and the resignation to which I had come: that never again was I going to hear the magic of a wall of massive, heavy thrash drowning out the noise of an un-civil civilization, a sound that seemed both crafted and primordial, that appealed to both my intellect and the animal that lives somewhere deep in our subconscious.  I need you to know where I was when I loaded up Death Magnetic and pressed play, so you can understand what it means now that the review has actually begun.

The opening heart-beat thumps of That Was Just Your Life filled our living room.  The guitar sailed across the air, feeling very much like a Ride The Lightning-era measure.  And then the big wall of rhythm and drums hit me.  Oh my GOD!  Lars mic’d his drums the old way!  No more of that “natural sound” crap!  The wall built slowly, and I spoke out loud to the music ‘Come on.  please do it.  Please…this has so much potential…come on…” and then it exploded in a monster, massive, thrash-filled, agressive, high-speed riff.  I literally threw my hands into the air, then brought my fist down in the universal motion for celebrating success and yelled “YES!  HOLY FUCK!  OH MY GOD!”  The song just blew up and was so old-school heavy that for just a moment I felt 16 again.

Of course James is singing in his newer style, adopted during the recording of the Black Album, improved in the years since, and I can’t blame him.  The old way nearly ruined his throat forever.  He no longer growls every syllable…he sings.  It’s not the same as it was when i was a teen, but it’s not as unbearable as it was when coupled with alterna-rock or that weird indy low-fi shit on St. Anger.  With the massiveness of the real Metallica behind him, it’s completely okay that he doesn’t growl like he did when he was twenty years old.  Most of us aren’t doing anything the way we did it when we were twenty years old.  Except for the other two original members of Metallica, anyway.

HOLY FUCK, Kirk Hammett is back.  Remember the virtuoso-level riffing?  The insane solos?  The speed?  It’s all back.  He takes it from mournful, soaring, un-distorted notes ala fade to black down to heavy, gravity-bearing crushing riffs that for all the world feel like modern versions of things like Motorbreath and Battery.

Lars?  He’s playing like a madman possessed.  He’s certainly going to need the oxygen tanks again to do this stuff live.  And maybe some meth.  The signature double bass riffs are back, as is a far more refined and less “natural” drum sound.  It’s not as processed as it was on And Justice, but neither is it naked and terrible as it was on St. anger.  His drums sound precisely and exactly as they should.  Big, heavy, booming and relentless, with complex time signature changes and pressure that only lets up in brief, necessary bursts that allow you to catch your breath before the next assault.

James is playing rhythm (and sometimes lead) just exactly like the old days.  Remember the vibe?  the Explorer slung low, his wrists flying and crushing the strings, creating this wave of noise with a staccato beat to it that was so aggressive you worried that your eardrums might actually try to leave your body?  Thing about the last third of Leper Messiah, how that crushing rhythm presented a canvas for Kirk to explore a complex and lengthy solo worthy of any of the great speed guitarists.  That sound is all over this record. 

Remember how they used to weave Kirk’s solos back into a dual rhythm and play the same things together to create so much heaviness that you could feel the weight of it as a palpable sensation? And then James would bow out of the rhythm and do a little soloing himself, then weave it back into the crushing heaviness and then they’d bridge out back into the main melody of the song? They’re totally doing that again.  And Lordy, the time changes.  The time signature changes are back.  Complicated songs with time signatures that force you to pay attention and feel the emotion not in the words, but in the music.

Lastly, let me speak about Robert Trujillo.  This guy was in two of my favorite bands in the late 80s: Suicidal Tendencies and Infectious Grooves.  Yes, he’s also the same guy that re-made Bob Daisley’s monster bass riffs on the re-issued versions of Diary of a Madman and the album that saved my sanity in the early 80s, Blizzard of Ozz.  I don’t blame him for that.  I blame Ozzy and the record company for not wanting to pay Bob Daisley royalties in the re-issues.

The bottom line is how does Robert Trujillo sound?  Fucking. Amazing.  That’s how he sounds.  I think all those years of funk obsession has paid off by making him as aware of time and progression as much as Cliff Burton was via classical music.  I don’t know who wrote what, or how much any one member contributed to anything, or how much of this is Rick Rubin’s influence.  All I know is that musically, this is right on par with Ride, Master and And Justice.

So much of the older sound is back, they way the guitars are tuned, the particular distortion styles they used, the soaring notes of the ballads all sound right…everything about this is right.  The staccato speed rhythm, the dual rhythms to form that wall of sonic assault, Kirk’s blistering solos, lars wailing away on the drums like it’s the last time he’s every going to be allowed to play them…and Robert Trujillo steps up admirably to fill the shoes of two of metal’s best and highly loved bassists.

Lyrically?  Death Magnetic is not as strong as Master or And Justice, and it’s not that Maiden-like storytelling that they adopted from the Irons and did so well.  There are a few lines that stick out as cheesy, like ‘Love is a four letter word, here in this prison ” in The Day That Never Comes.  Hwoever, as any honest Metallica fan will admit, not every line can be a winner and the past offers up many, many cornball examples. “The metallization of your inner soul?”  Lines like “Who are you? Where ya been? Where ya from? Gossip is burning on the tip of your tongue” from Holier Than Thou?  Be honest…this band has taken the strongly poetic lyric into the realms of ridiculousness on more than one occasion. Death Magnetic continues the trend established early in the history of this band.  Mostly good lyrics with the occasional bum line.

This information has nowhere else in this review to go but: It’s a long record with long songs.  I love that, and feel like it makes the record a smart value for your money on top of being awesome.

Overall, as an album experience, I could not recommend Death Magnetic more.  If you, like me, have lamented the loss of the heaviest band of them all…lament no more, my friend.  Metallica are back, in a big way.  Christ, man, even the old logo is back!  DUDE!  IT’S FUCKING METALLICA.  The real Metallica.  The one you’ve been missing. Buy Death Magnetic right now.  They’ve re-earned your respect and your money.

James?  Lars?  You are no longer The Unforgiven.  I can’t speak for everyone else, but I forgive you.  For Napster, for talking shit about And Justice, for talking shit about fans like me, for the eyeliner, for abusing Jason and for that stuff you called music on St. Anger.  All is forgiven.  You set aside your egos and you made a record that sounds current and retro, that captures the vibe of who you are as a band and moves it into 2008.

It’s enough to make a grown man weep with joy.