From Pitchfork....
So it is with Death Magnetic. Self-plagiarization abounds. "That Was Just Your Life" and "Cyanide" harken back to "Blackened" from ...And Justice for All. "The Day That Never Comes" has the clean tones of "Fade to Black" and the machine gun riff from "One". Still, Metallica wrote hundreds of riffs in the 1980s without repeating themselves, and to hear them so bereft of new ideas is disheartening. So is the fact that Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger are indelibly part of their bloodstream: "The End of the Line" and "The Judas Kiss" are built on those same bland hard rock riffs, and "Cyanide" tapes a Stone Temple Pilots chug to a disastrous stop/start section like a forgotten St. Anger deep cut. And like most sequels, the turgid "The Unforgiven III" should never have been made. Metallica just aren't very good at unpredictability. They're best at heavy metal thunder, and they've sadly lost the ability to summon it.
So I'm reading along and I come across "Unforgiven III." They did what? They made a third version? After the second was so bad?
What's your take on that song Deviation?
