586. Metallica / Beyond Magnetic [EP]. 2011. 3/5

Given that, of the 12 songs that eventually found their way onto Metallica's Death Magnetic album, I found six were in a good-to-excellent catagory, and six were in an average-to-poor catagory, it was always going to be hard to get into this EP. Let's face it, if they didn't make the cut in the first place, and there were average songs on the album, could they be better than those?

 

Cutting a long story short, the four songs here are OK. Not super, not complete rubbish. All four clock in at about 7-8 minutes each, which really is a bit of overkill, especially when you are trying to retain some sort of interest. There are some reasonable ideas here, and some better than OK soloing and riffs. Kirk's solo in "Rebel of Babylon" in particular is memorable.

 

If nothing else, given this release and the aforementioned last album, it does raise some hope that Metallica may well be getting back to a place where they were in their infancy. they will never produced another Master of Puppets or ... And Justice for All, but neither will anyone else. Cut off the fat off these songs, pulling them back to 4-5 minutes, and you'll have a much better collection. Getting Hetfield to listen to that advice would of course be the more difficult problem.