One Lifelong Fan’s Review of Metallica’s Death Magnetic

I must admit that even though I am a huge Metallica fan, Metallica hasn’t put out much worth listening to again and again since The Black Album. Death Magnetic, however, changes that for me.

At first listen to this album, I noticed a lot of similarities going back to their old style. I noticed certain riffs that sounded as though they came straight from And Justice For All, and even some stuff that’s similar to the old school Kill Em All album. The energy has definitely returned on this album and I feel that this one is going to be one of my long lasting “go-to” albums when I want to beat on my steering wheel during my commute.

However, not all good things come without bad. I actually pre-ordered this album with some concert tickets, and in doing so I didn’t feel like I was stealing from them by downloaded some leaked MP3’s prior to the album release. However, the audio quality of these initial MP3’s that I listened to sounded like crap. The volume level of them was so cranked up that it was impossible to hear most of the dynamics of the music. Was that a cymbal? I couldn’t even tell you!

After listening to the tracks, I thought for sure that they must’ve just been a bad rip. However, I decided to check out Metallica’s message boards to see if anyone else noticed how muddy it sounded.

Sadly, the boards were completely filled with threads of people complaining about the album clipping. At one point, someone on the boards received an email (from whom I can’t recall) stating that the sound issues would not be present on the CD. This gave us hope, however, upon receiving the CD, it still had the same horrible sound.

Worse yet, Metallica released this album for Guitar Hero III at the same time and it was instantly noticed that the video game didn’t have the clipping problems! From there, people were able to pull the tracks from the game and re-master them.

So though I’m not telling you to go steal their music (you don’t want to get Lars on a rant again, after all!), I do urge anyone who even has the slightest interest in Metallica to go buy this CD and give it a good listen, and after you do, go find the Guitar Hero III remix (A member of the Metallica forums who goes by the name “Moderus” has created the best version that I’ve heard). Once you get over the quality issues, this is a very solid album.

As a life-long Metallica fan, I must say that I am very glad that they’ve been able to pull out some of their old energy and record some great tracks again.

Photo Source: Alonso Murillo / Screachen

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