These rockers just get better

JAMES Hetfield, Metallica’s mordant singer and guitarist, reports to work first at the recent concert in Bucharest, Romania, loudly practicing vocal exercises.

Lars Ulrich, the group’s affable drummer, follows. Then comes the band’s long-haired surfers: the lead guitarist Kirk Hammett, a small man walking lightly on his toes; and the bassist Robert Trujillo, the newest member, heavy-featured and mild-mannered.

They are in a guarded outbuilding of Cotroceni Stadium. (The stadium usually serves a football team.) A low-ceilinged room has been remade into the band’s “tuning room”. There’s a green drum kit with two bass drums, racks of guitars and basses, and Pro Tools equipment for digital recording.

The band needs its 20-minute warm-ups for physical preparation — its members are all in their mid-40s now.

And in the last four years the group also has used the time to write new material, including much of its surprising, vigorous new album, Death Magnetic (Universal Music Malaysia).

A photographer asks the band members to stand together. “Again?” Hetfield mumbles. “We did that in ’84.”

The guitarists started playing entwined riffs and after 10 minutes they moved into Creeping Death, from 1984, the concert’s opener. It is gothic early Metallica: a song of negative certainty, written from the perspective of the 10th plague visited on Egypt.

“No new songs tonight,” Ulrich says apologetically.

The concert would be what most fans probably wanted anyway: music recorded between 1983 (Kill ’Em All, the first Metallica album) and 1991 (Metallica, a. k. a. the Black Album), but nothing from the often reviled second half of the band’s career.

Metallica will face the present soon enough, when it releases Death Magnetic on Sept. 12 (three days later in Malaysia).

The album, produced by Rick Rubin, is far better than anything the group has recorded in the last 12 years; it sounds as if the band has woken out of a daze.

But it may also be seen as a regression, evoking the band’s sound from the mid-80s.

Metallica’s music was athletic back then, crazy with grim, loud ornament: Hetfield’s death-fantasy lyrics, songs within songs, strafing and high-pitched guitar solos. But it didn’t stay that way.

Almost from the start progress equals integrity was an article of faith for the band.

There was one apostasy after another: ballads, acoustic-guitar sections, the banning of guitar solos, the cutting of hair. Finally the group hired a performance coach — a therapist, more or less — who played a major role in Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, the 2004 documentary about the band’s near-breakup and mending.

Rubin had seen that film and found it “brutal.”

Almost every summer Metallica mops up in Europe. The Bucharest show drew a sellout crowd of 23,000.

The city is architecturally ghoulish: an elegant 19th-century European capital whose Communist government left dull and crumbling boxes everywhere.

Before the Black Album, which sold 15 million copies in the US and pushed the band toward establishment acceptance, Metallica was both a midsize worldwide success and a subculture.

Membership in that subculture was something you had to work for. A man in his late 30s, a member of MetClub, the international Metallica fan organisation, tells how difficult it had been to find Metallica records in the 80s, during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu.

“Impossible. Somebody would smuggle one in, but you didn’t know that person. You asked around, and somebody would give you a cassette: a copy of a copy of a copy.” Here he was, 20 years later. That’s love.

But hatred is a sign of life in metal, and Metallica is also hated.

Each year about a million people go to Metallica concerts. And yet a good portion of fan talk about the band’s career forms a hard braid of insults.

Some believe that Metallica has not been any good since, well, since before Ceausescu fell. This logic cuts off Metallica’s best years after Master Of Puppets, from 1986. That was the last album with the band’s first bass player, Cliff Burton, who died in a bus accident when Metallica was touring Sweden that year.

Some say it hasn’t been any good since the Black Album, which inflated Metallica’s music into a plush sort of darkness, with shorter songs and bigger melodies.

Yet another faction says it hasn’t been any good since Load (1996) and Reload (1997), which moved still further from Metallica’s baseline metal identity.

Then there was St. Anger, in 2003: it seemed to confuse almost everyone. Metallica’s second bassist, Jason Newsted, had quit, and the album radiated anxiety. Still it sold nearly two million copies.

Finally, in 2004, came Some Kind Of Monster, which detailed the band’s woes.

There has been a happy ending. The band rebonded and went back on the road with a new bass player, Trujillo, a sweet-tempered man and a powerful musician.

But the film left you wondering whether Metallica had become irredeemably decadent. Interestingly, the band members have not distanced themselves from the film. Answering questions about their history, they refer to it almost as if it were an album.

In his first meeting with Metallica two years ago, Rubin gave the band a writing assignment. “I asked them to imagine themselves not as Metallica,” he said. “I said to them, let’s say there was a battle of the bands coming up and nobody knew who they were, and they can’t rely on any of their hits to get them over. What would that sound like?”

Hetfield said trying to go back in time was “a nice idea, and pretty near impossible”.

“We know too much,” he continued. “You can’t make yourself a virgin again. But I got what Rubin meant.”

The band members started developing new riffs on tour in their brief tuning-room sessions, all digitally recorded, on the theory, Hammett said, that “your best ideas come in the 30 seconds after you turn on your amplifier”.

After a few summers of touring, there were 60 hours of recorded riffs to choose from. All members receive shared writing credit on every song. “It was very collaborative,” Trujillo said. “Nobody was being selfish. It was like going to the best music school you could imagine.”

The riffs were fused into songs, compounds of all the band’s learning. (Hammett said he thought of it as “reclaiming ownership” over Metallica’s old vocabulary.)

They have thrash tempos and guitar solos again, both in Hammett’s old modal style and in his newer sound-smears of blues through wah-wah pedals.

More recent Metallica isn’t completely erased: medium-tempo stomps surface here and there as connector pieces.

The compositions are nasty and complex, with double and half-time rhythm switches, twinned and harmonised guitar solos and a few sweeping melodies recalling the Black Album.

In The Day That Never Comes, All Nightmare Long, My Apocalypse and others you think a song has reached its apex or endpoint and then, whoa: a new door opens, a new tower starts to rise.

Hetfield took on a challenge of the past by singing higher: Rubin asked that the band play in standard tuning, rather than with guitars tuned down a half-step, as they had been since 1992.

Hammett prepared at length for his solos, spending months borrowing ideas from rock and jazz guitarists as far apart as Pat Martino, Sonny Sharrock, Michael Schenker, Eddie Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix.

Then in the studio he winged it more than usual. (He reckons his solos on Death Magnetic are about three-quarters improvised.)

Other than a few rehab recovery songs like Broken, Beat & Scarred, for instance, with its call to “show your scars,” Hetfield’s death-drive is back, unsullied by positive thinking. From Cyanide: Suicide/I’ve already died/You’re just the funeral I’ve been waiting for/Cyanide/Living dead inside/Break this empty shell forever more.

Death Magnetic bets on the fact that these musicians have matured.

In that galloping, baroque old style, they sound as if they’re pushing, but not straining. It’s what some older jazz musicians find when they give up discovering new languages: the subtleties and grace of an individual style can be language enough. As Hetfield said: “We’re better.” – NYT

Metallica E-mail Contest

We are looking for 10 winners to take home a Death Magnetic CD each.

Q: Name the first Metallica album. …………......

Finish this sentence in 10 words or less: Metallica rocks my world because...

E-mail your entry (limited to ONE only) to: umusic1@umusic.com

Subject Field: Metallica-Sunday People Contest

Closing Date: Sept 9, 2008, noon.

Don’t forget to include your name, I.C. No and contact details.

Terms & conditions:Contest is open to all Malaysians except employees of NST and the organiser. Judges decision is final and no correspondence will be entertained. Late entries will not be entertained. Prizes are not transferable or redeemable for cash. Any inquiries, please e-mail umusic1@umusic.com