Feeding on the wrath of man - shot down, traumatic

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

21/04/23 : 72 Seasons - Metallica

Our fourth visit with Metallica - they've been a mix of "better than expected" and "absolutely as expected", but it's fair say I'm not a massive fan.  I'm expecting some fine guitar work though - whatever I think of the lads, they certainly know how to shred those axes.

Yup, no axe is left unshredded here, certainly.  The songs sound fine if you like that sort of thing but personally they all sound very much the same to me - "I like bad things.  I've done bad things.  Yeah, bad things are my kinda thing".  Do I have anything more to say about this?  Not really - I struggle to imagine this is going to too many people's gateway album to Metallica, but those that are going to love it will probably love it.  Oh, one other thing - it's 77 minutes long which I really didn't need.

We're at #1 with a new entry this week - it will be interesting to see how long it hangs around for.  The rest of the top five are The Weeknd (this album is on its 68th consecutive week in the top twenty!), Taylor Swift, Lewis Capaldi and SZA (up from #13 probably because her tour tickets went on sale) and we have one more new entry in the top ten, with Waterparks sneaking in at #10.  Random other fact from the week - last week's #1 is now at #84, which is some impressive drop.

Wikipedia has the most astonishingly pretentious guff about the album title - 72 seasons being your first 18 years that "form our true or false selves. The concept that we were told 'who we are' by our parents. A possible pigeonholing around what kind of personality we are".  Yada yada yada.  The critics were mostly nice about it - nicer than me, anyway.  And, of course, it's done phenomenally well everywhere, although it only got to #2 in the US.  And #25 in Lithuania.

"Customers also listened to Anthrax, Sepultura, Overkill and Halloween - I'm sure they're all lovely lads, but I'm happy maintaining blissful ignorance of them all.  And I'd be quite happy having maintained my previous ignorance of Metallica - but I have to admit I don't hate them nearly as much as I was expecting to.  They're also obviously skilful - I just don't see what they have that everyone goes so mad about.  And I suspect I'm never going to - but I'm sure they can live with that though.

14/04/23 - Perfectly fine if you like this sort of thing
28/04/23 - Yeah, I didn't mind this

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