I've been a lifelong Metallica fan. The black album was one of the first three records I bought myself (along with Green Day's Dookie and Faith No More's King For A Day ... Fool For A Lifetime), and I absolutely worshipped it. By the time Load came out, I'd got all the Metallica back catalogue and a fair amount of the rare stuff too. I even liked Load, and I liked Reload even more. Metallica at Birmingham in '96 was my second gig (the first having been Michael Jackson at Roundhay Park in '92 or '93!), and I saw them again headlining the Big Day Out at Milton Keynes Bowl in '99 - basically, for me in my adolescent years Metallica could do no wrong.
I've never been into downloading music so I didn't care about the whole Napster thing.
I didn't shed too many tears when Jason left, either.
But St Anger, dear god.
St Anger was unforgivable.
I probably don't need to expand on this statement too much since if you didn't close the window on first seeing the word 'Metallica', you already know that it's their career nadir: a dreadfully misguided attempt at making themselves more relevant by downtuning all their guitars à la nu-metal and replacing their drumkit with dustbin lids. It sounds atrocious, and the songs are appalling - unmemorable, weak, clumsily lyric-ed and far, far too long. Much as I generally regard Pitchfork with suspicion, their review will probably tell you as much as you may further need to know.
St Anger came out in 2003 when I was halfway through uni, and although I was massively disappointed I didn't care quite as much about Metallica as I had done six or seven years earlier. I was well into punk and hardcore by that stage, so it wasn't too painful an experience. So naturally I wrote off my childhood favourite band, assuming they would never come to any good ever again.
I was wrong, and that's why Metallica make me feel guilty.
Regular readers of my occasional blogging will be aware that last year I wrote a still-not-quite-finished Top 50 Albums Of The Decade piece, which included Metallica's most recent album Death Magnetic. [Sidenote: this piece will eventually be finished, as this meme has got me interested in writing about music again. Honest.]
I'm just going to paste my little outline of it here ...
Death Magnetic is the best Metallica record since ...And Justice For All. There, I said it. If there were an award each year for Album Most Expected To Be Uneventful And Boring But Actually Turns Out To Be Surprisingly Brilliant, this would surely have taken 2008’s title. Who would have thought that a bunch of rich middle-aged men could make a record which basically takes the best bits of all their previous records and smashes them all together? Well, I suspect that that’s exactly what happened: they’ll have taken on board the fact that St Anger was a big bag of bollocks, and they’ll have paid a bunch of lawyers or estate agents other such hell-bound scumbags a fuckload of money to tell them what to do and what not to do on the next record. “Hey guys ... lose that shitty drum sound. Put solos back in. Lots of them. If you’re going to do a ballad, you might as well link it to a respected song you already have (‘The Unforgiven III’). Let’s have some intricate Justice-esque riff-melody (the brilliant post-solo segue in ‘Cyanide’, and all of the excellent ‘Suicide & Redemption’). Stick in a heavy anthem (‘Broken, Beat & Scarred’). Take some of the underrated bluesy bits from Load / Reload and whack them into a metal track (‘The End Of The Line’). Have a media-friendly single which starts as a deceptive ballad and morphs into a five-minute riff-fest (‘The Day That Never Comes’).” Fanks, here’s a million dollars. But I don’t care how inorganic the birthing process for Death Magnetic was: from the heartbeat opening through to the frenetic finale, Metallica have not sounded this exciting in 20 years, and that is genuinely astonishing.
They were also exceptional at Reading in 2008, their set including 'Cyanide' and 'The Day That Never Comes' which at the time were new to the UK.
Does all this mean a newer, leaner, sharper, more relevant Metallica is here to stay? No, probably not. They're still not high on my list of favourite bands, not any more; whatever follows Death Magnetic may well be pretty poor in comparison. And they are now so, so mainstream that I feel guilty for that reason as well. To acknowledge that, the clip I'm choosing for this post is their performance of 'Cyanide' on that most middle class of music programmes, Jools Holland:
The little section at 5:10 makes the hairs on the back of my head stand up. Guiltily.
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