Metallica still rockin Heavy!
Metallica are getting ready to release their follow-up to 2003's much-maligned "St. Anger", and the tunes that Rolling Stone's David Fricke got to hear are old-school .
Producer Rick Rubin gave Metallica the following advice over two years ago, as the band knuckled down to write its next album: "I said, "Imagine you're not Metallica"", Rubin recalls. ""You don't have any hits to play, and you have to come up with material to play in a battle of the bands. What do you sound like?" "
"It was the obvious thing — that we didn't see", says singer-guitarist James Hetfield. Rubin, a longtime friend and fan who was producing a Metallica album for the first time, "gave it a focus, instantly, with that statement".
"Rick said he wanted to make the definitive Metallica record", says drummer Lars Ulrich, "a step forward that incorporated elements from what he considered our creative peak. Every time there was a fork in the road, we said, "In 1985, we would have done this"". One song illustrates Hetfield's lyric hook "Hunt You Down All Nightmare Long" (there are no formal song titles yet) with vicious-staccato guitar riddled with tempo U-turns and Ulrich's double-kick-drum thunderclaps - "It feels like old Metallica to me, but with more meaning now".
Metallica are a changed band from the one that went through group therapy and nearly broke up while making "St. Anger", a weirdness captured in the documentary "Some Kind Of Monster". "I was nervous because of what I saw in that movie", Rubin confesses. "But I found a unified force that had come to terms with all of the stuff that got dredged up." Hetfield, who went into rehab during the "St. Anger" sessions, remains on "the clean-and-sober path", as he puts it. And Metallica worked on the new album in bursts of several weeks to minimize time away from their families (all four band members are now fathers). "Making records in the Nineties wasn't a lot of fun", Ulrich says. "On this one, we made ourselves a promise: to have as civil an experience as possible."
After more than two years working on this record, Rubin has learned at least one lesson for the future. "There's no reason it can't be much faster", he says, laughing. "Before this one, my favorite Metallica records were the Garage records (the 1987 covers EP, "Garage Days Re-revisited", and the expanded 1998 version, "Garage Inc."). They sound the most like a band, and those were made very quickly. That may be the next step we try."
Metallica are getting ready to release their follow-up to 2003's much-maligned "St. Anger", and the tunes that Rolling Stone's David Fricke got to hear are old-school .
Producer Rick Rubin gave Metallica the following advice over two years ago, as the band knuckled down to write its next album: "I said, "Imagine you're not Metallica"", Rubin recalls. ""You don't have any hits to play, and you have to come up with material to play in a battle of the bands. What do you sound like?" "
"It was the obvious thing — that we didn't see", says singer-guitarist James Hetfield. Rubin, a longtime friend and fan who was producing a Metallica album for the first time, "gave it a focus, instantly, with that statement".
"Rick said he wanted to make the definitive Metallica record", says drummer Lars Ulrich, "a step forward that incorporated elements from what he considered our creative peak. Every time there was a fork in the road, we said, "In 1985, we would have done this"". One song illustrates Hetfield's lyric hook "Hunt You Down All Nightmare Long" (there are no formal song titles yet) with vicious-staccato guitar riddled with tempo U-turns and Ulrich's double-kick-drum thunderclaps - "It feels like old Metallica to me, but with more meaning now".
Metallica are a changed band from the one that went through group therapy and nearly broke up while making "St. Anger", a weirdness captured in the documentary "Some Kind Of Monster". "I was nervous because of what I saw in that movie", Rubin confesses. "But I found a unified force that had come to terms with all of the stuff that got dredged up." Hetfield, who went into rehab during the "St. Anger" sessions, remains on "the clean-and-sober path", as he puts it. And Metallica worked on the new album in bursts of several weeks to minimize time away from their families (all four band members are now fathers). "Making records in the Nineties wasn't a lot of fun", Ulrich says. "On this one, we made ourselves a promise: to have as civil an experience as possible."
After more than two years working on this record, Rubin has learned at least one lesson for the future. "There's no reason it can't be much faster", he says, laughing. "Before this one, my favorite Metallica records were the Garage records (the 1987 covers EP, "Garage Days Re-revisited", and the expanded 1998 version, "Garage Inc."). They sound the most like a band, and those were made very quickly. That may be the next step we try."
