Review Summary: Encyclopaedia Metallica.
A career in music is, by definition, one of constant challenges. While hungry young acts must endeavour to balance out their creative impulses against the demands of the industry and buying public, older artists are often faced with the conundrum of how best to stay relevant within the ever-changing music scene while still delivering what their now-loyal audience wants or expects to hear. Naturally, the longer an act's career, and the bigger their popularity, the harder and more real this struggle becomes, with many a veteran artist having found themselves firmly ensconced in both the 'diversification' trap and the black hole of self-parody.
As a hugely popular, decidedly mainstream band celebrating both the fortieth anniversary of their debut release and the twentieth anniversary of their midlife crisis, it stands to reason that Metallica would find themselves in precisely the above situation when priming a new release. In the case of Hetfield and company, however, their longevity constitutes an asset, as, having exorcised their creative demons all the way back at the start of the Millennium, the band found themselves free to spend the ensuing twenty years following in the footsteps of similarly contemporaries like Iron Maiden and AC/DC, whipping up another new batch of fair-to-middling songs every half a decade or so, the better to validate their continued existence and justify another worldwide tour where the setlists will most likely centre around the hits from their youth.
That is exactly what
72 Seasons is: a perfectly valid, yet wholly unspectacular late-period release by a scene juggernaut, poised to contribute a couple of minor additions to the group's immediate live setlist, but otherwise unlikely to distinguish itself within the band's overall discography. It is by no means a
bad album, and certainly far better than most non-believers (and even some diehards) might have expected (not to mention an improvement on its dull-as-dishwater predecessor), but it nonetheless remains a far cry from the History-making, genre-defining slew of releases the group put out during their late-80s and early-90s heyday.
Predictable though it may be, however,
72 Seasons does not deliver
precisely what might have been expected going in; rather than present the expectable (and expected) mashup of the band's two previous releases, the new album reaches a bit further back for its ingredients, coming across as more of a mixture between
Hardwired...to Selfdestruct and the two albums that first saw the band attempt to break free from the turn-of-the-decade thrash metal hordes more than thirty years ago. The first casual playthough reveals generous heaps of
...And Justice For All riffage mixed in with the
Hardwired polish, while subsequent listens bring out the liberal pilfering of melodies, grooves and vocal patterns from the band's mainstream-crossover self-titled release, with at least two songs being heavily reminiscent of hits from that album (the groove conducting
Sleepwalk My Life Away is unmistakably
Enter Sandman's, while follow-up
You Must Burn has more than a touch of
Sad But True, musically as well as thematically.)
Further delvings prove the well runs even deeper than that, however, as long-term Metallica fans will likely be able to pinpoint both musical and lyrical citations and callbacks to nearly every release in the band's discography, with the exception of
LuLu and possibly
St. Anger. The most obvious of these is lead single
Lux Aeterna, a three-and-a-half minute blast of straightforward, no-frills thrash metal which amounts to a virtual rewrite of original 1983 calling-card
Hit The Lights, while simultaneously referencing another iconic song from the debut in its pre-chorus cry of
'full speed or nothing ; elsewhere,
Room of Mirrors comes across as a lost B-side from magnum opus
Ride The Lightning, complete with surprisingly youthful vocals from the fifty-nine-year-old Hetfield, who strays impressively close to both his own raspy bark from forty years ago and arch-rival Dave Mustaine's trademark high croak at times. Other references are more subtle, but listeners even passably familiar with Metallica's ouevre will be able to easily identify song structures and instrumental passages akin to
Master Of Puppets' (
Shadows Follow), vocal melodies that would not have sounded out of place on
Re-Load (
Crown of Barbed Wire, If Darkness Had a Son), and, of course,
Death Magnetic's uniquely realised blend of thrash aggression and earworm hooks ([i]Chasing Light/i]). In fact, the album as a whole can almost be seen as an encapsulation of Metallica's entire career in one eighty-minute set of songs – a sort of aural encyclopedia of what and how Hetfield and his cohorts have contributed to the thrash and heavy rock scenes throughout their forty-year lifespan.
As well-realised as that particular aspect is, however, Metallica's literal maturity album (the lyrical concept deals with the coming-of-age struggles faced by most human youngsters) is not without its significant and immediately identifiable flaws. Much like with its predecessor, the main one of these has to do with song lengths; while
Seasons does contain a few more tracks on the shorter side when compared to
Hardwired, there is very little justification for most of these songs' seven-to-nine-minute runtimes (with songs like
Chasing Light actively running about a minute overlong), and
absolutely no excuse for the almost twelve minutes of closer
Inamorata, a song which reaches its logical ending point halfway through, then spends almost another entire track's length on show-offy jams and chorus repetitions which add nothing to the overall result. Similarly, while a solid half of the hooks contained here will linger in some form or another after a few listens (another improvement on the utterly unremarkable 2016 outing) the tracklist does still contain a few no-hopers which vanish from memory in-between listens, and come across as no more than acceptable tracklist-padders even when the album is on - a far cry from the tight, near-perfect setlists of days gone by.
Even despite these shortcomings, however, checks and balances for Metallica's eleventh studio album are overall positive, with the record leaning towards the high side of average as a standalone release (if not within the band's discography) and lining up with similar albums from acts at the same stage of their careers, like Pixies, Def Leppard, Ozzy Osbourne or the aforementioned AC/DC and Iron Maiden, most of which struggled (or outright failed) to clear this level of quality on their most recent releases. When this album is good, it is surprisingly good (
Lux Aeterna and
Master-meets-
Black banger
Screaming Suicide are on par with anything the band has put out in the past three decades), and while most of it remains far from a top-tier release from a remarkably inconsistent band,
72 Seasons nonetheless proves Metallica capable of aging gracefully (the midlife debacle of 2003's
St. Anger seemingly left firmly in the past) and successfully validates them as an active entity within the mainstream rock and heavy metal scene - though one openly going through the predictable pre-retirement motions before their current formula becomes too stale to maintain anymore.
Recommended Tracks
Screaming Suicide
Lux Aeterna
