1. That Was Just Your Life
2. The End Of The Line
3. Broken, Beat & Scarred
4. The Day That Never Comes
5. All Nightmare Long
6. Cyanide
7. The Unforgiven III
8. The Judas Kiss
9. Suicide & Redemption
10. My Apocalypse

Original Release Date: September 12, 2008
Label: Warner Bros.

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When I first heard that the show would be on the 26th of January, I knew I had to be there, because to me, there would be no better way to spend my birthday than to be rocking out along with one of my favorite bands. As you would expect, after all this, I had pretty high expectations. The best part is that they did not disappoint.

First of all, let me say, the setlist was amazing. It was like the band knew what songs I wanted to here. All my favorites were there: Creeping Death, Ride the Lightning, Blackened, and Motorbreath, as well as the expected classics: One, Master of Puppets, Nothing Else Matters, and Enter Sandman, all in one concert, and the band played them to perfection. For them to play a song like Motorbreath or Blackened with the speed and intensity they did after all these years was pretty incredible. They also played a lot of new stuff, which is to be expected (it is the World Magnetic Tour). Now I know some people didn’t like Death Magnetic for various reasons, but I loved it, and additionally I loved hearing its songs live. From the new album they played That Was Just Your Life, The End of the Line, Broken, Beat and Scarred, The Day That Never Comes, Cyanide, and All Nightmare Long, which is my personal favorite off Death Magnetic. Overall I thought the setlist couldn’t get any better. I happened to see the setlist for the second Chicago night as well as the Phoenix setlist, and was very glad I attended the first night. While songs like Harvester of Sorrow and Sanitarium are great, you can’t beat almost 20,000 people chanting “Die!” at the top of their lungs during Creeping Death.

In terms of the stage, lighting, and pyro, I thought it was solid overall. The lasers that circled the stage during the opener were interesting, but the band was harder to see during that particular song. I really enjoyed the flames that shot up in between the amps during “One” and thought it was a great compliment to the music. I’m glad to see that James’ accident with the pyro during theBlack Album tour hasn’t deterred the band in using it. I’m sure that not everybody liked the whole “in the round” thing, but I quite enjoyed it. The band divided their time well between each part of the stage, making everyone feel involved, even the nose bleeders like me. Lars’ drumset was on a rotating platform that would rotate towards a different part of the audience after every couple of songs. Also, I thought encore was really great. Before Seek and Destroy, James had the house lights brought up, and what seemed to be hundreds of beach balls came flying out of nowhere and the whole crowd was tossing them around. After the song, the band stayed on stage for another ten or so minutes talking to the crowd and tossing the last of the beach balls to the crowd. The band seemed to truly enjoy themselves and thrive with this kind of setup and was beneficial to the performance.

All in all, this will be a concert I will not soon forget, not only because it was great live, but also because Metallica has made every single tour date downloadable in an MP3 format. It is only ten bucks and the sound quality is pretty high. In fact, I’m listening to it as I write this. I also bought a Death Magnetic T-shirt while I was there as an extra souvenir. As for the best concert I’ve been to recently, I’d rank it only second behind Iron Maiden’s Somewhere Back in Time tour, which you’d know is damn good if you caught a Maiden show last summer. I encourage anybody who hasn’t seen them on this tour to get to a show, because like the guy sitting next to me told me, “You’re in for a real treat!”

Article: Matthew Nawara
Photos: Alonso Murillo

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Wrath eases you into the madness with “The Passing,” an instrumental introduction of sorts, which segues into “In Your Words,” a five-and-a-half minute pounding of your ear drums. This should really be the first track to begin with. I’m not sure what’s going on with the instrumental lead-in, but you’ll probably find yourself skipping over it to get to “In Your Words” anyhow. I have, and you will too. As expected, right off the bat the guitars and drums are thrashing like machines with a mission to destruct. Randy Blythe’s vocals go from both screams to clean (well, sort of). I picture Lamb of God standing atop a dark cliff with a fiery pit below, or atop a volcano boiling with eruption (Dethklok, anyone?).

Producer Josh Wilbur is on board for this one, and the mixing is great. Everything sounds great (and arguably better than ever before), but what’s up with the percussion in “Fake Messiah,” particularly the introduction? I think Lars Ulrich may have sent the band a drum track from St. Anger. And speaking of Ulrich and company, “Everything To Nothing” offers old school Metallica-like riffs. Chug, chug, chug they go into metal darkness. Insert James Hetfield and you might not distinguish it’s Lamb of God. The two bands toured together recently if that may serve as food for thought. And if you can’t tell me you don’t hear Mastodon in “Reclamation,” I don’t know what to tell you other than maybe you haven’t heard of ‘em. It’s really progressive and literally everything about the song screams Mastodon, which further excites me for the much-anticipated release of Crack the Skye. “Reclamation” is a great album finisher at seven minutes.

Wrath is different than anything the band has ever done in that it’s not all over the place and the production is peachy. The music is still thrashy, it’s still incredibly aggressive, but I feel I can follow along more comfortably. The internal flow of the songs is balanced. I also believe the guitars are the glue of this album. They grind, chug, and steamroll their way to your heart. Every song is aggressive. Every song is awesome. Don’t be discouraged if takes a spin or two to accept something a little different or unexpected.

Photo Source: Alonso Murillo

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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

What do you think? Rate and Review Death Magnetic

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Before we get to the top selling artist of 2008, there are some other music facts that we found interesting enough to share; specifically the fact that digital album sales are soaring and vinyl is making a comeback in a BIG way.

In 2008 physical album sales continued to decline, dropping -8.5% to 535.4 million; on the bright side, digital album sales soared 32% to 65.8 million units sold.  It’s no shocker that digital appears to be the future of the music industry. What was a bit of a surprise to everyone is the fast that vinyl records are making a huge come back; sales on vinyl jumped 89% last year to 1.88 million LPs sold. Even though illegal music downloading still rapidly occurs, the music industry should try to focus on the positives – Overall total music sales increased over 10% in 2008 to over 1.5 billion.

How do you break all those albums sold, into genres?  Well I’m glad  you asked because we have the numbers to satisfy your curious mind.

In 2008 the biggest nose dive award goes to Country music, declining in sales 24% in 2008 with sales at 47,657 million.  Rap wasn’t so far behind with a dive of almost 20% with sales of 33,410 million units.  R&B which is about 80% of the music you hear on the radio wasn’t that far behind either with a 20% decline, however the genre managed to sell 77,014 million albums.  While all genres saw a drop in sales in 2008, it was the rock related ones that declined the least. Alternative CD sales fell -8.7% with 80,919 million units sold. Rock declined -6.5% with 139,666 units sold, and metal saw the smallest decline in sales with only a -4.7% drop in 2008.

HORNS UP!
\m/  {o,,O}  \m/
Now for the stats you’re dying to read:

Biggest sellers of 2008:

1. Taylor Swift (4,003,000)
2. AC/DC (3,418,000) * a Walmart exclusive*
3. Lil Wayne (3,382,000)
4. Coldplay (2,691,000)
5. Metallica (2,466,000)
6. Kid Rock (2,405,000)
7. Jonas Brothers (2,340,000)
8. Sugarland (2,063,000)
9. Nickelback (1,953,000)
10. Jack Johnson (1,895,000)

Top 10 vinyl albums sales ended up in 2008:

1. In Rainbows/ Radiohead
2. Abbey Road / Beatles
3. Chinese Democracy / Guns N’ Roses
4. Funplex/ B-52′s
5. Third/ Portishead
6. In the Aeroplane… /Neutral Milk Hotel
7. Dark Side of the Moon/ Pink Floyd
8. Fleet Foxes/ Fleet Foxes
9. Death Magnetic/ Metallica
10. O.K. Computer/ Radiohead

Interesting music facts for 2008:

• Music purchases in 2008 reached 1.5 Billion, marking the fourth consecutive year music sales have exceeded 1 billion; 1.4 billion (2007) vs. 1.2 billion (2006) vs. 1 billion (2005).
• Music sales exceeded 65 million in the final week of 2008, representing the biggest sales week in the history of Nielsen SoundScan. The previous record was Christmas week 2007 with 58.4 million music purchases.
• Overall Album sales (including Albums and Track Equivalent Album sales) declined 8.5% compared to 2007.
• Total Album sales declined 14% compared to 2007.
• Metallica’s “Death Magnetic” is the best selling Internet album for the year with 144,000 sales.
• During 2008, more Vinyl Albums were purchased (1.88 million) than any other year in the history of Nielsen SoundScan. The previous record was in 2000, with 1.5 million LP album sales. **Note that more than 2 out of every 3 vinyl albums were purchased at an independent music store during the year.

2008 was a crappy year for the U.S. economy, but the record industry seems to be weathering the storm fairly well – After all people need something to listen to while they sob into their beer.

Photo Source: Big Machine Records

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