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Metallica - a band that I don't like much in that I always felt that they were overrated and mistakenly called one of the fathers of prog - metal. They did release two albums that I did like being "Ride the Lightning" and the self titled "Black Album". The previous album (Load) was an insipid release of standard heavy rock. This album again repeats the formula of the previous album. They seem to have jumped on standard rock formula bandwagon with the release of the "Black" album however that album was well done and well put together and it does contain some brilliant material. I'm not going to do a track by track review here in that there is really nothing that stands up to be counted. I do enjoy "the Unforgiven II" Many of the tracks here, to my ears, could have come from the Alice Cooper "Poison" period however Alice Cooper does what he does very much better than what these guys do.

If the listener is looking for listenable hard rock then there is nothing basically wrong with this album (or the previous one) but I prefer a little more complexity in the music that I listen to for pleasure. The problem that I have with Metallica is that to my view they are a two trick pony - the one being the thrash metal (of earlier albums) which they repeated ad infinitum over their first album releases, so much so that I could have been listening to one track over the course of their first few albums - repeated over and over again. The other trick was to follow the standard hard rock fare of later albums where again there is not much to differentiate between the tracks. I never saw the band members as anything like being masters of their instruments and I do demand a certain level of expertise from musicians which I can be able to hear clearly in the music.

There is nothing prog here whatsoever and in that light this album gets a two from me where on a standard rock review site it would have achieved a three.