If you haven't heard, Megadeth's new album Super Collider is going to be released soon and people have come to an agreement that it's almost as bad as their infamous 1999 album Risk. Have I personally heard either album yet? No, but the point here is to address a comment about Super Collider made by Metalsucks writer Axl Rosenberg. This is a quote from his recent review of the album:
"Super Collider makes Death Magnetic sound like Master of Puppets. Whoda thunk it?"My problem with this criticism is not that it makes out Super Collider to look terrible - because the two songs I've heard from the album have been pretty unappealing to me - but it's the assertion that Death Magnetic was this cataclysmic suckfest of an album, which it wasn't.
It's unfortunate, but it's become very popular in the metal community to hold Metallica to a low regard these days, and not just because of the Load through St. Anger albums, but their entire discography. I've seen people on metal-archives.com post reviews of Master of Puppets giving the album dismally low scores, and, in general, saying that you love Metallica is looked down upon by many metalheads, or at least the metalheads who fit into the "pimple-faced internet troll" category. This has no effect on how much I enjoy the band, but I will admit that it annoys me when I see it. I believe that automatically ignoring any band that's popular is just as ignorant as being led by the nose by the mainstream. I've said this many times before and I'll say it again; just listen to music indiscriminately and let yourself have a natural reaction to it, then decide what you like or don't like based on that. It's pretty fucking simple. I'm sure that there are indeed some metalheads out there who listen to old Metallica and genuinely don't like it for whatever reason, and that's acceptable, but I think that most Metallica haters have just hopped onto a bandwagon that says "Every other thrash band is better than stupid Metallica! Metallica sucks!"
This leads us to Death Magnetic, Metallica's "return to form" album. The tons of people who've already hopped on to that aforementioned bandwagon gave it an "F" rating before it even hit the streets, and once it DID hit the streets and people actually heard the damn thing, those same people knocked the score down even further to a quadruple F minus. Magazines like Revolver and Metal Hammer UK gleefully gave it an "Album of the Year" status, but the legions of anti-Metallica metal nerds came to the consensus that Death Magnetic was a just a half-baked apology for years of lackluster albums that was, indeed, just another lackluster album. My opinion of the album lies somewhere in the middle. Yes, I realize the album's flaws; first off, it did sound strongly like an apology, but to me, it's just a minor quibble. If the music actually sounds decent to my own ears then I don't really give a fuck if it's an apology or not, and the music was, in fact, decent. But being a product of recorded soundwaves, all the other problems I have with the album have to do with the music and overall sound. One of the biggest complaints about this album when it came out was the audio quality, and I agree, the production is all wrong on this thing. Everything is so compressed and loud, and the guitar and drum tones suck metaphorical dick. As far as the musicianship goes, Lars' drum performance was pretty average and James' singing was just as grating as it was when he started with that style back on the Load album. Also, there's ten songs on this album and almost all of them are over six minutes long. I personally would've knocked two of them off to streamline the album and give it more focus. Despite all of those complaints, I have to recognize that when Metallica dives into those lengthy, aggressive instrumental passages, magic just leaps out of my speakers. Once James' annoying vocal delivery ends and the band takes over, it takes me right back to the Metallica I loved on Ride the Lightening when I became a fan of the band to begin with. Death Magnetic succeeds on that level, and that's about all the satisfaction I need.
I'm not trying to argue that Death Magnetic was a fantastic album, because it honestly wasn't, in fact, I'd only give it a 7.8 out of 10. All I'm trying to argue is that it wasn't the awful piece of shit that people made it out to be back in 2008. It's a pretty good album, but this group of metalheads whose view is colored by an ideology that determines what to like and what to bash will never see it that way. All they'll see is an album that's "cool" to deride and disregard, as if it earns themselves a new level of "metal cred" of some sort. It doesn't. The only advice I have for those people is to throw away those colored lenses and remove everyone else from your mind to make decisions about what metal is good or not, because the only opinion that matters to you is your own.
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