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By Root 432 0

was super-tight and glossy. It was the sense of a band bringing a well-defined, carefully thought-out product to market; something that could be forgiven when, in the case of Black – their first major attempt to do so – it had resulted in such great work as ‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Sad but True’; or, paradoxically, in the case of Load, where the determination to subvert their own image clearly took such precedence over the actual songs. But here, on an album that purported to refute such notions in favour of a return to old-fashioned principles of musicianship and honest artistic endeavour – of, as Jason Newsted, of all people, put it, ‘[working] for eight hours a day in a rehearsal room like brothers should’ – it hits entirely the wrong note.

From the ponderous sound of the heartbeat that opens the album (as if the broken body of Metallica was coming slowly back to life on the operating table, like the moment in Kirk’s beloved Frankenstein when the good doctor cries: ‘It’s alive! It’s alive!’), to its truly cringe-inducing front cover image of a coffin – a motif that, excruciatingly, would feature throughout the two-year world tour they would embark on to promote the album – to surely the worst title of any Metallica album ever, Death Magnetic, an oblique reference to how so many rock stars have died young, as if magnets for death, this is Metallica-by-numbers; thrash-made-easy; the classic sound of a golden-era band delivering its goods with knobs on but few, if any, surprises for those of us whose memories are now longer than our hair. Even the pedantic sleevenotes seem hopelessly ill thought out, like a grown-up’s idea of a child’s drawing, the lyrics to the tracks partly disabled by the coffin-shaped cut-out that runs through every page and made even harder to decode through being scattered in random order, beginning with the last track first (perhaps not so randomly after all then). Naturally, there are the usual Anton Corbijn band shots, but even they – studied poses of each member standing in shades and leather jacket against a grainy black-and-white wall – could have been taken by Anton Anyone.

None of this stopped Death Magnetic becoming the most colossal success when it was released worldwide on 12 September 2008, going straight to Number One in thirty-two countries, including both Britain and America – the first time that had happened since Load twelve years before – thereby proving that metal fans would take even substandard prime-time-era Metallica over postmodern, Napster-baiting, therapist-consulting Metallica any day of the headbanging week. The album had shifted more than 490,000 copies in its first three days in the USA, making Metallica the only band in US chart history to have five albums debut at Number One (breaking their previous tie with The Beatles, U2 and the Dave Matthews Band). Reviews were also highly complimentary. The New York Times praised the album for ‘compositions that are nasty and complex’, while Time magazine claimed that ‘songs fly by with the force of the world’s angriest amusement-park ride, and when they set you down, often after seven or eight dizzying but tuneful minutes, giddiness is the only appropriate response’. The grass-roots reaction was the same, with the Kerrang! review proclaiming that ‘Metallica once again sound like one of the most exciting bands in the world’ making ‘a mockery of the modern [metal] competition’.

The key to this success, Lars told me some months later, during the band’s second round of arena-headlining dates in the UK, ‘was timing’. Death Magnetic was ‘a reconciliation with the past’. He had wondered if it was possible for the band to return with such fervour to its thrash roots. ‘But I knew that if it was gonna happen, the only way it could happen would be organically. It was not something that could be forced: “Now we have to sit down and make another of these records that has one foot in what we did in the Eighties.”’ It had been made possible by ‘the combination of Rick Rubin; the combination of the twentieth anniversary of Master of Puppets and