NO, REALLY GUYS, THIS NEXT METALLICA ALBUM IS GONNA BE THE SH*T

Oh, Lars Ulrich, when will you ever learn? Metallica’s drummer has a special talent for saying things that a) make no sense and b) will almost certainly piss off fans, if not the moment he says them, than sometime in the future, when they turn out to be not at all true.

His latest verbal faux pas comes via an interview with Rolling Stone, in which he discusses the next Metallica album. Here’s the full quote, with my analysis to follow:

“We’re about seven, eight songs into it,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich tells Rolling Stone magazine about the record, which will once again be produced by Rick Rubin. “We do it in rounds. We come up with something, we leave it, go to the next thing, come up with something basic, leave it and circle back around. Next month we’ll go back and start embellishing: ‘Let’s double that one part and come up with a middle bit.’”

“If Death Magnetic was a logical successor to …And Justice For All, the next album will be a heavier Black Album,” Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett tells Rolling Stone, using the popular nickname for 1991’s Metallica. ‘We’re not going to the depths of complexity that we did for Death Magnetic. The stuff we’re coming up with is more groove-oriented, a heavier version of what we were doing in the early Nineties.’

“When people talk about the old stuff, they think Justice,” Ulrich tells Rolling Stone. “But look at ‘Harvester Of Sorrow’ on that album. It’s a fairly simple five-minute song. And ‘Fuel’ [on 1997’s Reload] is an absolute scorcher live. Right now, I’m thinking shorter, more to-the-point.”

I take issue with calling Death Magnetic the successor to …Justice, because ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???, but I think if the band really is trying to make The Black Album II, well, that’s a great idea. I’ve been saying for a long time that while I don’t have faith the band can ever reach the heights of their greatest glories (that is, the first four albums) again, my greatest hope for them would be to make something along the lines of the Black Album — an album with catchy songs that are impossible to hate, even if they’re not bona fide masterpieces.

That being said, the fact that Ulrich says the band is trying to make another Black Album makes me worried that they will completely fail at this seemingly simple task. Why? Because it seems like everything the band touches turns to shit. If they set out to make another Justice and ended up Death Magnetic, than what will happen this time around? They’re so out of touch with reality, it almost seems like the better thing to do would be to set a different goal, one that’s a hundred and eight degrees away from recording something Black Album-esque — like, make the “logical successor” to St. Anger. Because then they’d probably make another Black Album by accident.

Meanwhile, in semi-related news, in the same interview, Ulrich says the band’s upcoming 3D movie will be a concert film — so, alas, no Metallica’s Spice World for us. He also reveals that the band ” didn’t want to do [the film]” and “were sold on it by our managers,” which is probably a good indicator of the level of artistic quality fans can expect from this thing.

-AR

[via Metal Injection and Metal Insider]