Metallica is magnetic again

The News Review:

- Metallica is magnetic again
- From Tahoe to New rleans ‘” without leaving the South Shore
- Song to download: “King of Those Who Know”

Metallica is magnetic again
Detroit Free Press United States 
“And we also toured a couple of the summers when we were preparing music and actually when we were recording the album we went out on a summer tour as well. Summer tours take a little bit of time. “Metal for the massesThe smartest thing Metallica ever did was to discover that just because the band’s music was metal didn’t mean it couldn’t be pop. The technical prowess is there for fans of pure metal while hooks and Hetfield’s lyrics invite listeners who might otherwise scoff at the idea of listening to the genre. “Thrash” doesn’t sound like a word that your grandma wants to have anything to do with but Metallica’s compositions can be as intricate and rewarding as any symphony. “Death Magnetic” has classic Metallica riffs and rhythms in spades but that doesn’t necessarily mean its tunes are a bunch of retreads. “Sometimes you get on that whole retro trip where everyone’s just banking on only the hits” says Trujillo.

From Tahoe to New rleans ‘” without leaving the South Shore
Tahoe Daily Tribune CA 
(For the record the CD that I received at work this year and listen to the most on my own is Sonic Boom Six’s “Ruff Guide to Genre-Terrorism. “)Perhaps it was inevitable that my house-sitting gig which began with Tim in the Big Easy would lead to my easing my banishment from purchasing new music beginning with a New rleans band at that. While I was attending to my friend’s puppy I ripped his unattended copy of “NLA” the debut album from the Southern metal supergroup Down. Phil Anselmo was never my favorite part of Pantera but his former side project drinks equally from groove metal hesher rock and Zeppelin and my resistance like the levees finally broke with Down’s third album in September. So since it was a 2007 album (one of the best of last year according to the Action wannabes over at Rolling Stone in fact) it doesn’t count toward my best albums of 2008. Maybe it’s best to take my two recommendations with a grain of salt since I was trying not to listen to new music but two albums stand out:Lil Wayne ‘Tha Carter III’The impressive thing about Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” isn’t that it’s impossible to disprove the New rleans rapper’s various claims to be Cajun a Martian and a goblin but its range of emotion from the bombastic “Got Money” to the ribald “Lollipop” to the weirdness of “Phone Home” to the heartfelt New rleans love letter “Tie My Hands. “”Tha Carter III” was no stranger to critics’ best-of lists but there was no stranger hip-hop album last year.
Related from Champcarnews: Auto dealership troubles ripple across the region

Song to download: “King of Those Who Know”
Winston-Salem Journal NC 
Verse chorus and bridge may remain but if they do they are not signifying in the normal ways. There is lots of detail lots of sections but the music feels tense and dire all the way through. The drama the moments of safety and release in a song’s cycles don’t exist for it. The band Cynic’s guitarist Paul Masvidal and drummer Sean Reinert came out of death metal but Cynic retains only a slender connection to the genre — mainly the same ambivalence toward traditional song structure.