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In 1991, Metallica made a very obvious decision to sell out. They tossed aside the complex 8-minute songs that had, to that point, defined their sound. They abandoned the oft-mentioned band boycott of trite music videos and radio singles. And they hired Bon Jovi’s producer to help engineer the new direction of the band’s career. This from a group whose rhythm guitarist proudly scratched KILL BON JOVI into his axe.

The sellout worked — the self-titled “black album” had something like 7 singles with accompanying music videos. It even featured a love song — an enormous departure from the political and classic literature-inspired lyrics that preceded this period. And the thing sold millions. The band was never the same, and 1991 AAlgar walked away from the experience a little more cynical than he had been.

So now it’s seventeen years, 5 studio albums and a bass player later. Ask a kid born in the 80s about Metallica and they’ll tell you about a group that showed up on the radar in the early 90s, got heavy airplay on alternative stations and rocked at Lollapalooza. They probably wouldn’t know what to make of Death Magnetic any more than those of us who were there (more or less) from the beginning.

I guess this album is meant to be from an alternate universe where the black album never happened, because there’s a clear effort here to return to the old formula. Unfortunately, at least in my opinion, the band is just too far gone to make the old magic happen. Oh sure, it has the really long and noodly stuff like I used to love. It even has an instrumental as the penultimate track, followed by an extra-aggressive finale, which was the basic formula they used with Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and …And Justice for All. But it just ain’t the same.

At first, I thought the problem might have been with me — that I’m just too far removed from “classic Metallica” to appreciate a return to the fundamentals. Or maybe I still take that adolescent betrayal personally and can’t look at them with the same eyes I did when I wore a mullet and a jean jacket. But I’ve had the thing on continuous play for a couple of weeks, hoping it’d grow on me (occasionally following one of those aforementioned classics to create a sense of aural continuity) and it’s not just me. It’s really not.

If anything, this feels like another cynical move on the band’s part — like they lost the hipster crowd that bought them their mansions and now, into their forties, they’re trying to reclaim their original audience. Maybe it was the loss of Cliff Burton all those years ago, but this just doesn’t feel like the same band that recorded Master of Puppets. Even worse, it doesn’t even feel as much like old school Metallica as, say, Beatallica.

Still, it’s better than St. Anger. But then… what isn’t?

Oh, and guys? Sequels to songs are lame. We really didn’t need “The Unforgiven III” any more than we needed “The Devil Goes Back to Georgia” or “Woomp, Addams Family, There It Is!”