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By Root 440 0

the first time since the 1980s Metallica are allowing the songs to go where they will, not completely into the big ‘movements’ of yore, but certainly abandoning the commercial template that had served them so well with Bob Rock. None of the tracks fade out, either, but simply vanish into flames. The other stand-out moment is ‘The Unforgiven III’, a moving piano soliloquy, with strings and horns, extemporising over the atmospheric intro of the original, before moving into a song nearly eight minutes long, like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ meets ‘Orion’; the only self-consciously slow track on an album determined to complete the circle, rather than break the mould, including the most enormous guitar-fest three-quarters of the way through; a real love-it-or-hate-it moment, and better for it. After that, however, the album rather plunges, beginning with ‘The Judas Kiss’, eight more minutes recalling the band that recorded ‘Sad but True’ and ‘Disposable Heroes’, with more-frantic-by-the-moment soloing from Kirk, which, rather than galvanise the listener, has the opposite effect of making them wonder if this doesn’t smack too much of box-ticking; painstakingly putting Humpty Dumpty back together again only to find his oval arse where his pointy head had once been, and vice versa.

This feeling reaches its apotheosis on the album’s most bloatedly self-referential – and, frankly, embarrassing – moment in the near-ten-minute instrumental ‘Suicide & Redemption’, clearly intended as a big ‘Call of Ktulu’ moment that, against the odds, might just have succeeded if it didn’t go on (and on). The only track to fade out, it’s a safe bet most general listeners will have exercised the skip option on their CD players/laptops/iPods long before then. This underlines the chief failings of the album: the completely tokenistic feel it all has; the very 1980s signage it gives everything. Ending with the shortest track at just over five minutes, ‘My Apocalypse’ is yet another track entirely given over, it seems, to somehow recreating the golden era of the band; redolent of the title track of Master of Puppets, its riff straight from ‘Battery’. The question inevitably occurs: who is all this meant to please? Those fans too young to have experienced the real thing first time around? The producer whose modus operandi centres on recapturing the spirit of those heydays? Or perhaps a band that has now so thoroughly lost its way, musically, it simply wishes to wipe the slate clean and go back to what it perceives as simpler, more heartfelt times? Or more cynically, to simply tap into the classic rock market in the same way AC/DC, Iron Maiden and Kiss now do, reinforcing the nostalgia for a not-always-shared past grown way out of proportion to its original meaning? As if everything after Black had not really happened and, like Bobby Ewing, the band had simply stepped out of the shower to begin again where they had left off before everything went, you know, all fuzzy and freaked-out and fucked-up?

That certainly seemed to be the message they were sending out when James characterised the new songs as ‘like old Metallica…but with more meaning now’, or when they had begun performing the title track to…And Justice for All again in their latter shows. Kirk, meanwhile, had begun referring openly to the new album as feeling ‘like the band’s sixth album’ rather than what would be their ninth –i.e. the follow-up to Black, rather than St. Anger. This from one of the main instigators of Metallica’s mid-1990s musical rethink.

These were not reasons, on their own, to damn the new Metallica album, however. If most of the lyrics seemed to concern death, that was fine, too. As J.R.R. Tolkien once put it, ‘the best human stories are always about one thing: the inevitability of death’. What ultimately disappointed were not the songs – solid enough attempts to at least do what they had once been best at, delivering thrash metal anthems for the headbanging crowd – and certainly not Rubin’s production, which, despite his reputation for valuing atmosphere over technical perfection,