DEATH MAGNETIC

Death Magnetic is an excellent edition to any prog music collection. Well obviously of course, if you can tolerate heavy metal. Which most fans of progressive rock are quite open minded, seeing the nature of the genre, so I can imagine lots of prog fans would like this.

I was very excited to hear this album. As a metal fan on the side of being a prog head, I was pleasantly surprised to find that they were working on a quite progressive album, featuring several quite long songs, a 10 minute instrumental, and the complexity they had during Master of Puppets and ...And Justice For All!

Once again, most of the progressiveness comes from the song structures, rather than things such as use of unique instruments, and experimentation. They came back as heavy as the black album, and with more complexity. I saw them 2 nights ago, and found their performance to be amazing.

The way they write their music is also of interest to me, because it's a very progressive way of music writing. Oftentimes before a show, they would go on a 30 minute jam of complete improvisation, and record it. When they listened to it later, they would take certain things out, tweak them, and they may or may not appear on an official album. I do this in my writing, it's a very good idea. Writing in pieces, and then combining them. In this way, many of the songs have different parts and passages that are quite interesting and fun to listen to.

4 stars out of 5. I'd say it's as good as Master of Puppets. But I gave Puppets 5 because of its obvious influence on the progressive metal genre. Being out only a few months, we have no clue how much influence this album will have yet, though. But it's a good album, believe me.