Death Magnetic Going Strong!

I listen to my music at work. It’s nice to shift focus every now and then to listen to whatever song is on (because it’s always on shuffle) as a way to take some of the stress away, but it’s also nice as background noise. I’m not interested in what my coworkers are saying and prefer to stay in my own little world and do my work.

As far as what’s on my iPod, most of it consists of this or that song from a particular artist’s album, just the best so I’m not constantly clicking to a different song. When I get a new album, I throw the whole album on it and listen to it once or twice all the way through and then keep it on for a little while and if one of the songs jumps out as not that great, or I’m reaching to click forward, I’ll write the name of the song down and remove it from the playlist when I get home. So far I’ve lost one of the songs that I thought was good when I made the playlist in the first place.

Some albums are just plain good enough to keep the whole thing on all the time, though the list of no-kidding, front to back and everything between included on the iPod is few.

The one album that I keep THINKING I’m going to remove songs from is Metallica’s Death Magnetic. I love Metallica, they’ve been a favorite of mine for a very long time and I’ve been liking them for just about as long as I’ve been playing guitar (going on twelve years). By no means am I a hardcore fan to the extent where I would lie and say stuff like “St. Anger was a good album” or anything like that. I’m still realistic. Not one of their albums made it onto my iPod in its entirety, except Death Magnetic because I know I haven’t given it a fair shake.

But I could have sworn that after giving it a fair shake I would remove the songs I didn’t like and move on like with every other album on my iPod.

This just doesn’t happen though. Every time a song from it comes on I turn my head a little to the speaker saying “what’s this?” and waiting for the vocals to come on and when they do, it’s unmistakably James Hetfield and I say “Ah.”

And they’re good. I haven’t run across one of the songs that I wanted to move away from or remove from the playlist.

I’m pretty happy about this. I wasn’t filled with too much faith after St. Anger and the idea of backtracking to sometime between the Justice album and the Black album didn’t really appeal to me either. One was so complex that much of it was boring (and in dire need of being stripped down) and one was leaning too heavily toward popular metal at the time. I find the album refreshing both in its aggression and rattiness. It’s like a garage metal band, not this big huge machine known as Metallica. It’s like they’re human again and the fact that it’s not polished and super clean and there’s some audible degradation from the excessive volume, it makes it feel… I don’t know… more REAL.

Kudos, Metallica.