REVIEW: Death Magnet by Metallica

Metallica has long been a stable of the “metal” of hard-core rock genre, depending on how you define either, and it is true that many who listen to metal or harder music got their start listening to Metallica. Yet recently their albums have become the laughingstock of the serious musical community. Their musical quality and abilities have slipped and have been putting out albums largely lauded as shit. But with this new album, it would all change, they would turn their nu-metal train around and give us an album more like “...And Justice for All,” rather than “Re-Load.” But they failed. In attempting to make a sweeping, heavy, intense record, they fall miles short, leaving us with little over an hour of boring drudgery, baffling any listener into wondering why they ever enjoyed Metallica in the first place.
The first thing that strikes the listener when this album is played is the drumming. Its is absolutely atrocious. The sloppy playing, poor timing and the terrible mix that lays the drum tracks on top of everything else simply ruin the experience. For example the first track, “That Was Just Your Life,” starts out relatively decent, showing promise with the guitar intro, until Lars starts bashing away like an angry toddler, drowning out not only the rest of the band, but any hopes for a decent album. Next we are forced to turn to James Hetfield. I don’t know what he has done over these last years but he has lost all semblance of a singing voice. Any subtly of range he had is not degraded to single-tone grunting, belting the poorly-written lyrics, (Do I really need to know that “love is a four letter word,” over and over again? I think not.) into the microphone rendering himself nearly incomprehensible. However, Kirk and James have at least retained their guitar chops, laying down some very decent solos and licks from time time time. They are however, few and far between. It also seems that in writing this album, it was decided that only one riff per song was needed. This is clearly not the case. Hearing their one riff being punded over and over for 7 minutes is like being hit in the temple with a ball-peen hammer. The last thing that seems to be a glaring failure of judgment is the bass. namely the lack thereof. There is no pounding bass driving the songs forwards, no interesting licks to pull you back in after a solo, basically the surprising lack of bass is another nail in Death Magnet’s Coffin.

The Verdict!
Download, listen to once or twice and then, never again. Hardly worth your time.

On Modern Love

If you think simply about generations there are basically 3 generations still alive today. Us, our parents, and our grandparents, with some muddling in the middle...
Now if you think about the defining sort of emotions that have tied each generation together, mainly the idea of "love", you come to see a pattern based within each generation. For example. The first generation, or our grandparents; their relationships and "Love" was a necessity based love, owing to cultural ties. Our country had just come out of a massive war, and needed to rebuild so the culture of marriage, and relationships reflected that. Take my own grandfather for example. He only met my grandmother after the war, she was the sister to one of his war buddies, they met at a family party and while there are many amusing stories that go along, they quickly married and had children, based upon the idea of rebuilding, and this led to our parents, the baby boomers and those immediately after.
Our parents though, I believe was a "Love" of change. The 60's and 70's defined this, with the breaking away from the "Love of Necessity" that defined their parents. They were seeking something much more spiritual, rather than cultural, as their parents before them had done.
So they experimented a bit more still marrying young, but sometimes waiting longer to have children, or dating longer.
Now this brings us to our generation. Which I believe is the generation embracing the "Falsity of Love."
A generation where we are assaulted on all sides by the previous concepts, except even more often they have been compacted together. and packaged as such, with a media saturation that has never been seen before. The ideal of love, and the concepts of previous generations have been forced upon us, which gives us a disillusion of love. We easily slide into short-term relationships. and yet, when we are content, and attracted we so easily define it as love. But it most certainly is nothing of the sort. It is the media portrayal acted out with false results.
How many people do you know who have very recently married their high school sweethearts?
but what about our parents?
or our grandparents?
in both of the preceding generations the percentage has been much higher. But now, we slip into the illusion of love, yet slip out just as quickly. Where does that leave us? It leaves us as a disillusioned generation, unwilling to accept what our parents have left for us, yet unable, due to the shackles of the idiocy and conceptual ideals of love that the media has saturated our lives.
Yet for some reason we want this. We consume this false love culture faster than anything else.
We accept the fact that we will not have a singular "Love", but many, many ones. All of them meaning different things. Love has ceased to be a singularity!
Never before has love had such a plural nature to it. You are my love now! But what about in a year? Have we become so fickle that we discard potential for lifelong relationships in such a short time?
Our parents did not follow the same route.
No. I firmly believe that what is so easily proclaimed as love now is merely a product of culture. It is a mesh of our fast-pased culture with television, the internet and other mediums loudly proclaiming that we need to be greedy in our relationships, seeking out not a few, or even just one meaningful one, but many. This is coupled with our disillusion with the concepts of love that our parents and grandparents passed down upon us, stating that we as individuals SHOULD have found some thing that corresponds to their idea of love, at our current hormonal age.
This leads us to a culture where we idealize love, yet instead of seeking it, and treasuring it, we throw it away. We want love over and over again, and cannot accept the idea of a relationship without the proclamation of love.
This culture of false love, while may not lead to the total and utter annihilation of society, does lead to a dark and confusing future. Nowhere in any civilized history has a generation accepted such strong emotional bonds, so easily, or let go of them so quickly. What will out generation bring to the future with this? Will we be a generation of throwaway relationships? Or will we continue to attempt to imitate our parents, only with disastrous results? Our families, our children subject to our inability to accept a long-term relationship. How can a culture survive without constant bonds. Society has always been built around the model of the family. The head of state, the governing body looking paternally out over the masses. But what of our short-term relationships? What does that have to bode for our civilization? Will that crumble under the falsities of our relationships? Or will our generation mature to imitate our parents and embrace their morals? But would that really save us? And can we really do that?