I can’t remember media coverage like this for any other band in connection with an album release. For Pete’s sake, there was even an interview with Lars Ulrich the financial section of my newspaper the other day, describing his skills as the manager of a billion dollar business called Metallica.

They’ve been on the telly, in all national papers and the radio – the Danes have been bombarded by the efficient MetalliCats PR machine over the past month, and along that snippets of the album have been released on MySpace and missionmetallica.com  - plus of course the stubborn claims that this new album reaches farther back into Metallica history, beyond the dreaded St. Anger and the much scolded Load/Reload efforts.

Is all this attention deserved? From the journalists’ point of view, yeah. ‘Some Kind of Monster’ fuelled so many great stories that they have plenty of emotional porn to wallow in and the potential downfall of the once-so-mighty is always fascinating. So in that sense, the attention is natural.

From the musical view point, after three releases that have all received the stamps ranging from mediocre to poor, the amount of attention seems a bit odd. But it is undeniably there, and the reason can be found in five albums that changed so much for a lot of people at different stages of rock history and massive touring. That’s why Metallica can still draw so much attention.

And the strength of ‘Death Magnetic’ is that it in fact does reach back without being a complete sell-out.

What I hear in this album is a band that embraces the energy of their debut album, the riff-happiness of the same album, the heaviness of their master piece, ‘Master of Puppets’, the melodic beauty of their most progressive album, ‘…And Justice for All’, and the rock element of ‘Load’. The rock element is in my ears mostly represented by Hetfield’s voice. The aggressiveness of his youth is forever gone it would seem, and if there is one thing I miss a bit on ‘Death Magnetic’, I’d have to single out the fact that James doesn’t throw his American twang away and just tries to forget that he took singing lessons.

But this becomes a detail when the four horsemen ride out with those riffs and allow Kirk to do his solos. For the first time since 1988, listening to a new Metallica track has made the hairs stand on my arms – joy, my friends, pure joy.

Another thing I find immensely cool is that Metallica have taken the opportunity of letting us know exactly where they come from. Their inspirations of old shine through with nods to the old masters Sabbath, Purple (Lars Ulrich in particular!), Zeppelin and Hendrix (that riff in Suicide & Redemption…that’s Spanish Castle Magic, innit?!).

For me, this is what should have come out after the Black album, too bad Metallica didn’t think so at the time. It’s been a long time coming, but here it finally is.

Attention deserved – dame deal done!

Rating: 89/100 - Thomas, September 16th