Death Magnetic, pulling closer still

I stood in line to get Metallica’s new album Thursday night. The music store GUF in central Copenhagen had received permission to start selling it one hour before everybody else, and Metallica themselves were there to sign it. Of course the line went all the way down the street and around the block. After I’d stood in line for an hour, I was 10 meters from the entrance to the store when a guy came out and told us the record had sold out. Then I left my place and went home, feeling like a bit of a tool.

Instead, I picked the album up yesterday from a shop where I didn’t have to stand in line at all. And I love it. I don’t write about music a lot here, because I’m no music reviewer, and this is a game blog. But I’ll make exceptions for certain bands, and Metallica is one of them – like many others, I was introduced to heavy metal by this band, and I’ve continued to buy all their albums as a matter of course since then. Wasn’t too happy with St. Anger though it had some inspired moments, but Death Magnetic sounds much more “natural” – more like the good old pre-crisis Metallica.

I was especially happy to see Unforgiven III on the track list. The Unforgiven was one of my favourite tracks on the Black Album, the record that turned me to the dark side, so to speak. Its sequel on ReLoad somehow managed to be even better, and while the third installment doesn’t quite manage the same heights Unforgiven II reached, I love it.

Of course I also bought all of Death Magnetic as a track pack for Guitar Hero 3 a few hours before I bought the actual album. A simultaneous album release on CD and in a game is a first, apparently, and while it ultimately turned out to be too weird for me to play Metallica songs in GH3 before actually hearing them for the first time, I think GH3 has actually helped me grok the album faster than I otherwise would.

The thing with metal, at least for me, is that the harder it is, the longer it takes me to understand. Melody is very important to me, and a lot of metal songs hide their melodies inside elaborate rhythmic patterns and riffs, or the melody will only come out as a sort of cooperation between the various elements of the piece, which means I have to listen to a given song many times before I manage to assemble it inside my head. The upside to this is that in my experience, the longer it takes for me to grok a song, the greater the longevity of the piece – the longer I can listen to it before I’ve exhausted it so I need to give it a break.

But when you play a song in Guitar Hero 3, it forces you to pay attention to certain parts of the mix – the guitars or the bass, depending on what you play. Especially in coop, when you can play the bass, you have to listen to the song in a completely different way because most non-bass-players never notice the bass at all, unless it’s really prominent as it tends to be in eg. Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music.

Since I had a fellow Metallica fan over yesterday, we decided to play the new album in co-op, and the experience allowed me to deconstruct the songs and pay attention to the guitars and the bass as well as the vocals. As a result, I already understand the album pretty well in spite of its complexity. Time will tell if playing the songs in GH3 will also decrease the longevity of the album.

Death Magnetic is a terrific album, and probably Metallica’s best outing since Load. One reviewer described it as a greatest hits with new songs, and that’s the most accurate summary I could possibly think of.