Nobody doubts that Death Magnetic is Metallica's best album in years. In fact, their best since The Black Album - before tantrums and tedium set in.
It's achieved something that Metallica have never managed before - properly crossing over. They're all over the broadsheets, appearing on Jools Holland, getting Culture Show specials, and the album even has its own deluxe Guitar Hero version. And that's where they're coming unstuck. People are saying the Guitar Hero version is much better.
Death Magnetic is the latest victim of the music industry's ongoing loudness war, the race to achieve the biggest noise possible. Songs are compressed as hard as they'll go, but since CDs only have certain amount of amplitude, it means all the other textures and nuances that make music music are all but obliterated. It seems that people aren't happy.
And when your own engineer is distancing himself from the record, you know you're in trouble (well, Metallica probably don't, but you get the picture). Ted Jensen, head engineer at Sterling Sound, has done just that, claiming the tracks were already "brickwalled" to within an inch of their, er, death, by the time they arrived on his decks.
Apparently, the blame for this lies with Rick Rubin, the album's producer. He's long been singled out as a repeat offender. His work on Red Hot Chili Peppers' buffed-up Californication has been deemed unlistenable by plenty of commentators.
So what do you think? Death Magnetic has been on the shelves for a week, and powered its way past Glasvegas to No 1. Are you banging your head, in quite the wrong way, against the sonic brickwall?
