DALLAS --
IMAGINE THE smell of barbecue and methamphetamine under the Texas summer sun. This year, the Ozzfest festival -- an all-day celebration of brawny and sinister intemperate metal music -- took its amplifiers to the Lone Star State, and tens of thousands of fans came from across the South and beyond to turn a loss themselves in guitar-solo alchemy and skull-and-bone lyrics.
Backstage and a million miles off from the mosh, the four members of Metallica, the night's headline work, seemed to be surrounded by a bubble of calm. Mingling by a catering table, they chatted quietly with friends and family and sipped from bottles of water or else of whisky as they waited for the masseuse to make it. The only real tension came through the headphone from New York and Los Angeles, where a deadline was looming. After two age of work, the concluding mix on their new album, "Death Magnetic," due Sept. 12, was simply hours away from completion in Manhattan, and drummer Lars Ulrich was safekeeping tabs from Texas.
"Unless in that respect is some major hiccup, today is the last day of creative input signal," said Ulrich, the compact, Danish-born player who is the band's most plainspoken member. "I'm one day from disownment the record. In the morning I can verbalise about it as part of my past. For months hoi polloi have been asking me what the new criminal record is like. I've told them, 'I don't know, I'm likewise close to it.' As of tomorrow perhaps I tin start answering."
Ulrich was being coy. Everyone in Metallica's circle is privately airheaded with the new album which, under the steering of imported star producer Rick Rubin, is a return to the thunderous menace of the band's mid-1980s work. Bassist Rob Trujillo, with a grinning, came the closest to bragging. "I will say this: Our contribution to popular refinement this time around is a identical, very strong one."
The album, their first in fivesome years, is clearly one of the major releases of 2008, but the question of where Metallica exactly fits into contemporaneous pop refinement is a slippery matter. The band is a proud 20th century animal in sound and heart, but that's not the most pressing problem. The real yield is whether Metallica, the hardest metallic element band of its generation, has shown its world too much of a soft side.
The 2004 documentary "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky started off as a straightforward "fashioning of the album" feature film about the 2003 collection "St. Anger." It terminated up as a racking, extended therapy session as the band members, shaken by lead singer James Hetfield's abrupt entry into rehab, bickered and worked with a controversial healer named Phil Towle.
"Monster" screened at the Sundance Film Festival and north Korean won strong reviews, but many longtime Metallica fans were aghast. The world's sterling fire-breathing metal monster was sitting on camera and revealing its own fears? Who wants a tender Metallica?
"I know, I bed, people called it 'Some Kind of Whiners,' " guitarist Kirk Hammett said with a groan. "Look, I can't watch it. I don't regular talk around it. It brings me back to that time, and it wasn't a good meter for me. And I never wanted that . . . motion picture to come out in the first-class honours degree place. I feel like it's an albatross around our neck. I hope this novel album will come out and make it clear that we've moved on. We're much more coordinated and mature."
A band is born
METALLICA began with a want ad: "Drummer looking for other metal musicians to cram with Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden."
Ulrich was in Los Angeles and, at age 18, was bouncy around the globe following his love of metal music. His father was not only a tennis pro but also a respected jazz musician ( Dexter Gordon, in fact, was Ulrich's godfather), but for young Ulrich the sonic template had been Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. A rangy blond kyd named James Hetfield, elevated in a religiously strict home in Downey, answered the ad and a band was born.
More than 57 meg Metallica albums have been shipped to U.S. stores, according to the Recording Industry Assn. of America. That's more than U2, Celine Dion or Fleetwood Mac and just 3 million shy of Michael Jackson's life history total.
Since 1991, the band's producer had been Bob Rock. After the tumultuousness of "St. Anger" and the making of "Monster," Hetfield aforementioned, it was a good time to make a break. They also had brought in a new bassist, Trujillo, to replace 14-year member Jason New- sted, wHO left in a huff right earlier "St. Anger" -- yet another soap opera.
"A chapter has closed here, we've purged a lot of stuff from the past tense," said Hetfield, the chief lyricist for the stria and its most renowned face. "So after that we wanted to move on. We got a new bass player, a new attitude, and so we told Bob we were departure in a new focusing. We started working on songs without any manufacturer at all, and that was new for us."
They then turned to Rubin, the guru for landmark albums by artists as disparate as Johnny Cash, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dixie Chicks and the Beastie Boys. While former producer Rock had been "the first one in the studio each sunrise turning on the lights and the one with the plan," Hetfield aforementioned, Rubin was a more occasional presence. "Rick Rubin didn't even have keys, he wasn't even skinny the edifice during the sessions!"
Asked a few months ago about his goals for "Death Magnetic," Rubin said, simply, that he wanted the band to use their mid-1980s cultivate as a stylistic starting point. "All of the things they have through with since then end up taking the music into a newfangled place, just this way of life it still holds on to the things that made those albums so powerful."
Ulrich said what Rubin really brought to the table was decisiveness. "He's no intercessor. There is no careen in what he says. If me and Hetfield butt heads, he will listen and say, 'This is right, that's wrong.' One time, we played something new and he didn't like it. 'That makes me want to kill myself,' he says. Then later he hears a different version he says, 'I want to hear that 1,000 times over.' "
The title of "Death Magnetic," Ulrich has said, is a reference to musicians who seemed drawn to death (among them Cliff Burton, the band's bassist who was killed in a 1986 tour-bus ram in Sweden). The song titles fit the nature of the band's euphony, which is relentlessly grim and at times furious: "Broken, Beat & Scarred," "Cyanide," "Suicide & Redemption," etc. Though Metallica has pulled its music toward the commercial at certain points in the past tense, this album (which fulfills its get with Warner Music Group) features epic songs with strafing guitar and artillery-like drums; ane clocks in at skinny ly 10 minutes. It hasn't sounded this serious since Reagan was in office.
"I think we successfully recalled the feelings of 'Master of Puppets' merely with the knowledge of now," said Hetfield, someway using the language of therapy to describe a soundtrack to the apocalypse. "We did a bunch of looking forward just we unbroken looking in the rearview mirror."
It was a few hours ahead showtime and Hetfield canted back a tall glass with a pulpy concoction. "It's a fruit-blended deglutition our enchantress doctor made for me. Pretty good. Not like the old days when I'd be looking for a vodka bottle. They told me this stuff is an anti-accident" -- he said, with a wink, intentionally mispronouncing antioxidant -- "and that's skillful. God knows I had enough accidents in the past."
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