The best way to move past a mistake is to just pretend that
it didn’t happen.

Certainly, this is the road Metallica has taken: 2003’s St.
Anger has all but been forgotten by
everyone including the band, as they’ve dropped its songs from their set lists in recent performances. Five years later,
Metallica is back to help
people forget that blunder with Death Magnetic, an album which marks Metallica’s attempt to prove that they can still
knock you on your ass. The key word is, of course, ‘attempt.’

Death finds Metallica
in the middle of self-reflection, looking in the mirror in an attempt to
convince itself that it still has ‘it,’ all the while ignoring the deep wrinkles
and the bad left knee.

The album may be what singer/guitarist James Hetfield and
company consider a ‘return’ to their ’80s sound, but it’s more or less
Metallica trying to record a sequel to Justice using their twin albums Load and ReLoad as a prism.

That being said, it is no surprise that one of the best
tracks here, the single “The Day that Never Comes,” is a song where thrash is
only the latter half of the song, after a long, slow build. A quasi-retread of
classics “Fade to Black” and “One” — the eight-minute beast — plays out as the
result of those two filtered through “Bleeding Me.”

While the slower-tempo songs are the most listenable, there
are still moments of Metallica’s heyday lurking in the furious cuts in “All
Nightmare Long” and “My Apocalypse.” Both prove that, if pushed in the right
direction, Metallica can still rip your face off. Sadly, these are about the
only standouts in an otherwise astoundingly slapdash record.

Despite the ups and downs of the album musically, the words
coming from Hetfield’s mouth are sometimes stupid, sometimes terrible and
always lame. Lyrically, Magnetic is a
horn of plenty of suck, a damn shame considering Metallica used to be a great
source of sociopolitical cynicism.

It really doesn’t get any dumber than when Hertfield wails
“‘Love’ is a four-letter word” during the aforementioned “The Day” for what
appears to be no reason. It really mars an otherwise OK song lyrically. Also on
par with that lameness is “Suicide, I’ve already died/ You’re just the funeral
I’ve been waiting for/ Cyanide, living dead inside/ Break this empty shell
forevermore” from “Cyanide.” The lyric is inherently cringe-worthy, but when
sung by a 45-year-old, the chorus takes on a whole new level of depressing.

The problem overall is that this collection of lyrics is being
written and sung by guys who, at half their current ages (bassist Rob Trujillo
aside), were writing biting social commentary on topics like addiction, the
death penalty and war. Now, these guys are churning out phrasings that a
16-year-old would scream at his/her parents after they took the car away. This
quartet has defied the notion that maturity comes with age.

Metallica may have recovered from the aftermath of the mess
that was St. Anger, if only to a degree.
If Metallica could find a decent source for lyrical inspiration, then they’d
have a real comeback album. But, as it stands, Death Magnetic perpetuates the argument that the foursome will never
grow up.

3 stars out of 5