The one thing that hasn’t changed is the level of expectation Metallica still command. “I was thinking the other day,” Ulrich says, “about how everyone expects us to continue to release albums that define the genre, to ‘save’ metal. And that’s a lot of fucking pressure, really. Why hasn’t anyone dethroned us yet? We support all the great new metal bands, take them under our wing, but people still want us to carry the whole genre on our backs.”
But Metallica are the pioneers and figureheads of modern metal, the genre’s Beatles; they did it first and on the biggest scale, they won this music its mainstream acceptance. Theirs is the standard by which newcomers will always be measured, and while they might be faster and louder than Metallica, no one else will ever be Metallica.
Although Death Magnetic is plagued by a couple of sub-grunge grunters and something suspiciously like a power ballad, when it’s good — which is at least half the time — it’s great, the group playing painstakingly composed riffs with all the violent precision of their golden era.
As they play One on stage at Reading tonight, preceded by a barrage of pyrotechnics and special effects that would rival a Hollywood blockbuster, it’s clear that age hasn’t impaired their ability to play up their sturm und drang, for all the effort it must demand. But it feels odd to hear the song’s visceral horror played out as pulpy stadium-rock bombast tonight, while Metallica fans in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming home in wheelchairs and coffins from a controversial war they had no say in. I wonder if the James Hetfield of 1986 might have found it odd too.
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