Spun: Metallica

By Jon Roe

Metallica attempted to channel the violent heavy metal energy that powered ’80s albums like Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets on their new album Death Magnetic and succeeded, mostly. Though, as a whole, Magnetic is nowhere near as well put together as Lightning or Puppets, it is better than their recent efforts and much better than their terrible last album, St. Anger.

In the five years since St. Anger, Metallica has continued to move their sound away from the more mainstream efforts they put out in the ’90s. It works out well on Death Magnetic and they seem to have recaptured their ability to thrash. They manage to string together both head bang-worthy riffs and screaming guitar solos on “Broken, Beat & Scarred” and the opener “That Was Just Your Life.” Unfortunately, Magnetic lacks the top-quality power metal ballad, like “One,” that helped Metallica’s rise to mainstream relevance. They try on “The Unforgiven III,” which isn’t too bad of a song, but largely miss the mark. The production quality of Magnetic also sets it above St. Anger. The album sounds appropriately harsh and not too tinny like Anger, which sounded like drummer Lars Ulrich was playing a set of trashcans.

When bands have been operating for over a quarter of a century like Metallica, they will constantly be compared to what they’ve produced before. Death Magnetic stands by itself as an above average heavy metal album, but is not nearly as good as the band’s best efforts decades ago.