METALLICA "72 Seasons" - A Review

Full disclosure: Metallica is my favorite band.  The Black Album (along with Nevermind) is the first album I ever bought.  Growing up they were my band, y'know?  They were also the first band that ever betrayed me, because man did I hate Load when it dropped.  I came around not too much later, but by the end of the 90s I was fucking sick of them.

Then St. Anger happened.  I love St. Anger.  I won't defend it; every criticism of it is pretty valid.  I love it despite its faults, not because of them.  I have a weird relationship with this band.  Death Magnetic might be my favorite Metallica album.  Hell, I put S&M 2 in my Top 20 Of 2020 mostly because of the Metallica Monday concert streams keeping me sane(ish) through the worst of the Pandemic.

But Hardwired...To Self Destruct was my least favorite thing they'd put out.  Yes, even worse than Lulu because even though I don't like a single song on that album, at least it gave me something to talk about.  It had entertainment value.  Hardwired had a couple of decent songs and a pile of dogshit blended in.  So when "Lux AEterna" dropped at the very end of last November, I had hopes.  Could Metallica at least make a decent album again?

In fact, "Lux AEterna" was the perfect choice for an opening salvo: a fun, three minute New Wave Of British Heavy Metal romp.  But there was an odd catch: We not only got a new single, but an album title reveal, cover art, a release date and tour dates.  That's a lot right out of the gate!  And...they're all five months away?  That seemed...sub-optimal.

It was a strange choice.  If you drop a single out of nowhere, usually you do it closer to the release date, but hey, new times, new strategies.  All the singles for an album come out before it drops now, so maybe they had that in mind.  

Okay, y'know what?  I'm beating around the bush.  My reaction to the second single "Screaming Suicide" is the same as my reaction to the album as a whole: It's fitting the color scheme for 72 Seasons is yellow, because it's a great big butter sandwich.

A foot-long butter sandwich at that because hoo boy does it never end.

The third single "If Darkness Had A Son" is the moment where I said out loud "Okay.  Fine.  Metallica are out of ideas".  Then the middle section was kiiiind of interesting (if I'm being charitable), but that's it.  Turns out skipping the fourth single didn't matter because it's the opener.

And it's pretty good!  "72 Seasons" is in the neighborhood of "Spit Out The Bone", which is a nice bridge of continuity from the closer on Hardwired to here.  It's a seven-and-a-half minute slab of thrash that...admittedly sounds kinda tired.  This is as hard as the album goes and it's a step down from even seven years ago.  The songwriting is more interesting, but you can tell Father Time is catching up with them.  It's missing some piss and vinegar, though you might not catch it at first.  It just doesn't punch quite as hard as it should.  And that's in spite of being seven and a half minutes that don't let up and are possibly about gun violence?  There's a lot of lines in the song that give me that vibe, but nothing direct.

Which winds up being a major problem with this album: the lyrics are all vague to the point of generic.  And that doesn't help when most of the songs are interchangeable.  Remember I said that "Screaming Suicide" was plain as a butter sandwich?  Well, what if I told you it's my third favorite song on this album?  I can at least pick it out of the lineup.  Hearing it in context helps it greatly, which is a thing that happens quite often (look at my favorite song of last year for instance; I didn't even like that one on second listen).  But in this case, it's worse news for the album because my opinion of it didn't go up too much.  I half think the title track accrued so much good will by being better than the second and third singles that I gave "Shadows Follow" a pass.  (For the record I had to open up YouTube music to look up the name of that one to type it.  I can't hum you a bar, and looking at the lyrics didn't ring any bells either.)

So yeah, I remember liking "Shadows Follow", but I don't remember it at all.  "Screaming Suicide" and I have come to a comfortable detente, so what about the rest of it?  Well, the first major stumbling block is "Sleepwalk My Life Away", a nearly seven minute pile of boring.  I was not impressed but I hadn't turned on 72 Seasons yet.  No, that started to happen with "You Must Burn!".   

Nobody needs a lecture about cancel culture from a 60 year old man who's last notable political stance was being proud his music was being used to torture people in Guantanamo (look it up).  Whatever stance you take on "Cancel Culture" or the Culture War or whatever...aren't you sick of hearing about it?  Nobody needs this.  I'm sick of people bitching about it, frankly.  Most people that worry about getting "cancelled" usually end up having opinions that are rotten as shit anyway, so I don't wanna hear those either.  You could make an argument that the vaguery of the lyrics on this album might have come out of a fear of damaging the Metalli-brand by taking a stance on something, but honestly if this freezing cold take of "cancel culture bad" is what we'd get if they tried to say something...they can say it, but I also have a right to think it's whack.  (Also, you're multi-millionaires.  You will never be de-platformed.)

After that is "Lux AEterna", which is tonal whiplash since we go from this dour, bitchy screed to this pump up anthem about how the band will burn forever (with a completely opposite meaning of "burn" from the last song to boot).  It's just such a clashy juxtaposition.

Past "Lux AEterna" it all goes downhill and never recovers.  It's the same goddam song as "Sleepwalk My Life Away" but slightly better six times, with the ironic exception of a four minute song called "Too Far Gone?".  That one has a pulse at least.  The least necessary song is the bloated behemoth of a closer, the 11-minute "Inamorata".  It's the only song with any clean tone on this mid-paced snoozefest and it doesn't do a damn thing with it.  Make no mistake: Metallica can do mid-paced music with aplomb: The Black Album, Load and Reload are choc full of fine examples.  But "If Darkness Had A Son" is one of the standouts on the back half, and that was the one where I thought they'd completely run out of ideas.

This album being dogshit puts the last fourteen years of the band's output into a more damning light.  The only thing approaching quality was Beyond Magnetic (2011), a four song EP of leftover, technically unfinished songs from the Death Magnetic (2008) sessions winged out to an unsuspecting public as damage control in the wake of Lulu.  What else is there?  S&M 2?  Let me put it to you this way: "The Lords Of Summer" is one of the best songs they've done in more than a decade.  Hell, you could put together a playlist of their loosie songs ("I Disappear", "No Leaf Clover", "- Human", "The Lords Of Summer" and the Beyond Magnetic EP in that order with "We Did It Again" as a hidden bonus track (trust me: look that one up if you've never heard it)) and it would kill the ten songs you could scrape together from Hardwired and 72 Seasons that have any reason to exist.

It's over, folks.

I wasn't sure if Metallica had any good albums left in them, but I was hoping they at least had a decent one.  They may prove me wrong in seven to eight years when they're pushing 70, but I'm not holding my breath.