Well, I hate to be the one to disappoint all of the haters here, but I’ve heard the first five songs off of the new CD, and all I could say afterwards was…
That’s right, I was speechless for a few minutes. I’ve listened to Metallica since I was given this “Metal Massacre I” tape around ’83 that had this kick butt tune called “Hit the Lights” on it. At the time I was blown away by that version of the tune and became an instant fan. Fast forward to today and I have to say that I felt the same way about the five tunes I have recently heard as I did about “Hit the Lights” back then: I am blown away.
That was over twenty years ago. Each and every one of us has changed dramatically over the past twenty years and if you happen to be working at the same company that you were back then (if you were old enough to work at all!) then I highly doubt that you are doing the same thing at that company. The truth is, musicians get ripped on all of the time for going through this syndrome that all of us go through: change. Expecting someone to do the same thing over and over and over for twenty years without going nuts is highly unrealistic. Only AC/DC is allowed to sound exactly the same after this length of time, but that’s because they were nuts *before* they started in the music biz… hehehe…
As for Metallica, yes they explored other ideas musically. Had they not released these explorations as CD’s then people would have screamed for them until they did. Had they released them as another band name (which musicians often do) people still would have bought them. That’s what fans do. Compared side by side to Master of Puppets there are just as many “mid-tempo” tracks to be found on that as there are on Load, it’s just that Load contained songs that clocked in under the time limit that you could call “radio playable”. I’m not saying that Load is anywhere as good as Master, but it does hold up as a solid hard rock/metal CD on it’s own.
Mainly what has happened on this new Metallica CD is that James has “combined” the old voice with the new voice. The reasons here are two-fold. One, he actually learned how to carry a note over the past twenty years and once you “learn” how to sing it’s hard to not use your “true” singing voice. And two, his old style of “singing” was bad on the vocal chords. Again, only AC/DC can gargle Drano and sing the same way for twenty years and still talk.
I predict that a majority of the hate-them-because-they-sound-different-after-twenty-years crowd are going to eventually get every song off of this new CD, be it from a legal purchase or from the Internet, they will gladly add this to their Metallica collection because it is quite possibly their best work to date.
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Yea, they're playin this summer! But, who here besides me believes that they have become sellouts? No offense to those hardcore, head-bangin' fans out there, 
but they're playing with Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park! 
...grr
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