Metallica: Beyond Magnetic EP (Available on I-Tunes now, CD Release on January 31st)

[Commander PK]

I'm a bit late to the game on this one, with all the Van Halen buzz I haven't been paying attention. This Metallica EP was released on I-Tunes back in December. All four tracks are rough demos of songs that did not make it onto Death Magnetic in 2008.

Death Magnetic was great, but these four tracks are also songs that could have made it onto the album. All four are great tracks. One can only hope the next Metallica album will be as good as what came out of the Magnetic sessions.

Because I'm a nice guy, here are all the songs on Youtube.

1. Hate Train

2. Just A Bullet Away

3. Hell And Back

4. Rebel Of Babylon

FYI: Rebel of Babylon is about Layne Staley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZBZS4x9lts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNX-Uu1EynA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cLnEsCDT8M&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmKoOevPYLs&feature=related

[No_Pressure]

I wish somebody would break into Kirk's house, their studio, and the metallica trailer while they're on tour just to destroy every ****ing wah pedal he has. Its like he takes every solo and says "well it obviously could be better... BETTER RECORD IT WITH A WAH PEDAL!"

Oh, and I remember they were talking about how they cut out a bunch of songs that they just weren't 100% thrilled about for the album when it came out. I was really happy to hear that because as they stopped cutting out the unpolished and not so great songs I think their releases dropped off in quality. While they had some songs in the 80's per album that they never really played much live because they didn't even love those songs themselves, they had a whole lot fewer throwaway songs than many bands and it didn't start to get watered down until the black album and especially load/reload. I would mention St. Anger but there isn't a single song in its complete released form from that album which I think they should have released. Some of them could have been good if they had changed A,B,C but holy crap.

I still don't like Lars' drum sound. The snare doesn't sound right to me. I wish they kept their rectifiers or whatever mesa amps they had used for so long on their old releases. The guitar riffs are good but even the distortion sounds too...nice...I don't know how to describe it. I love James Hetfield's guitar riffs, I think many of their songs on death magnetic sound a lot cleaner than say ride the lightning through the black album. I liked death magnetic overall, I was glad to see them return to form, and unlike load/reload/the black album/st.anger it gets as regular play in the car as kill em all through justice.

James' vocals improved on this compared to the past few releases. I know he blew his voice out irreparably in about 1993-1994 during a string of shows where he pushed himself too far, but he really made an effort in this album to be able to sing with some songs recorded in E. With that said, I don't know where his lyrics have gone or really where they came from. He wrote some crazy bizarre **** in the 80's but it all seemed to be fairly focused and specific on a topic or idea. Somewhere along the line his lyrics got more and more vague and strange. Rather than singing about the four horsemen of the apocalypse, dying in the electric chair, being a slave to drugs, or killing the planet with pollution a lot of his lyrics these days seem to both overtly or subtly have something to do with him and his personal struggles, or sometimes the rest of the members of the band. Its either that or some completely off the wall abstract subject matter.

Example: all nightmare long and the judas kiss are examples of his older style of songwriting. One is about Judas from the bible which is not uncharted territory given creeping death and the four horsemen. All nightmare long is about scary ass dreams- perhaps a bit more abstract but no more abstract than the thing that should not be which is about cthulu and crazy monstrous weird ****.

At the same time, what the hell is the end of the line about exactly? I know it contains references to people who are running out of time in what they're doing, but it has all those phrases that mention burning through all your gasoline, latest highs to all time lows, there are references to celebrity status, dieties (sp) and then mentions that the slave becomes the master. I don't know if this song is about anything specific. James Hetfield used to hit you over the head with it, and I honestly think that's where he works best because I love the guy but he isn't exactly super deep from my estimations. Try to figure out the unforgiven III with all of its nautical references and bull**** like that, then go back and listen to seek and destroy, a song about getting into a fight and beating the **** out of people. Their lyrics obviously started to change around the black album, or perhaps even somewhat on justice. Load/reload is completely full of songs where I honestly can only guess what the **** James Hetfield is actually talking about.

That brings me to these releases. Obviously I don't care if songs are released, but I'll just say I'm still glad they left them off the album. All four of these are wordy and the lyrics don't exactly do anything for me to put it nicely. This is coming from a huge fan of metallica and James Hetfield in particular. He's the reason I play the guitar, and I don't like to hate on things they do and cling to the past so I generally accept their changes over an almost 30 year career now because how much do people change over the course of 30 years. I would probably be embarrassed for these guys if they were almost in their 50's and still writing songs with the mindsets they had at 18 when half of their songs were about getting drunk, acting ****ing crazy at a concert, getting in a fight, or the general topic of death in its various forms (typically warfare or something).

I still feel the need to compare their current work with their past work. I suppose it isn't fair to compare on the basis of good or bad when music is subjective and their early work especially master of puppets is considered by many metal fans as sort of a bible of metal or holy grail or whatever extremely important title you could attach to it. I can only say that what they're doing today is different. They've made noticeable changes to their song sound and structure, and I don't think they did those things by accident in spite of how many fans enjoy and agree with it all. I don't love these 4 songs. I don't like the lyrics for any of them really but there are some nice metal guitar riffs in there.

I don't know where I'm going with this and I know I'm ranting at this point so I'll just stop. I love metallica. I like a lot of music in a lot of different genres, but metallica is the stuff I can really just keep going back to and enjoying no matter how many times I've heard something. Oh and I'm sort of drunk tonight, I apologize that I didn't really maintain my typically well structured prose. This was hard for me to read, but that might be because I had a few. I know I just corrected like 5 typos though.

[Commander PK]

Wow, I appreciate your passion man. Now go sober up.

All jokes aside, I really feel like Death Magnetic was their third best work as a whole behind Master and Ride. They can't do better than those two albums. The other side of things, is the feeling you get from new Metallica will never be what it was the first time you heard the old stuff. This ain't the 80's or early 90's anymore. It is what it is.

For me though, I'd take this Metallica over no Metallica at all.