Last Sunday, having read largely positive reviews and having enjoyed the live version of Cyanide on their Myspace page, I bought Metallica’s new album. My initial reaction was good. There were some great riffs and an energy and excitement to the record that had been missing from everything the band had done after Smell The Glove the Black Album. But going back and listening to it again, there was something about the production that wasn’t right. There was a harshness about it somehow, separate from the hardness of the music and the instrumentation, that was unpleasant. I still wasn’t entirely certain what was wrong, though, until on Tuesday I listened to The Day That Never Comes on headphones. It was then immediately obvious that there were clipping problems adding really harsh square-wave distortion over everything.

According to the Internet, I’m not the only person to notice this problem. Considering just how bad it is, this wasn’t surprising. But what I was surprised to learn was that the album sounds much better in Guitar Hero 3.

Intrigued, I grabbed a torrent and downloaded digital rips of the Guitar Hero mix of the album in FLAC format. And they do indeed sound much better than the CD. But…they aren’t perfect. They’re very quiet, and could really do with a proper mastering job, with a bit of compression and normalisation. Only…not as much as the album got, which led to it sounding so nasty.

So I set about doing my clumsy, amateurish best to do so. I will freely admit that I know very little about audio mastering, and bearing this in mind, I kept things fairly minimal, just applying a fairly modest level of compression and raising volume levels, using Master of Puppets as a rough guide to how loud the files should sound. The only difficulty in this process lay with the penultimate track, Suicide and Redemption. About six and a half minutes in to the version on the CD is a pair of guitar solos, the first played by James Hetfield and the second by Kirk Hammett. But in Guitar Hero, there are two versions of the track, and the pair of solos is replaced by an extended version of either one or the other. I considered just picking one version and sticking with that (probably the one with Hetfield’s solo), but since I liked the way that the two solos complement each other, I decided against that. I also tried splicing in the portion of the CD version from that point, but although I managed to get it pretty seamless, the shift in sound quality was still too obvious, and so that approach didn’t work either. Eventually I settled on splicing the two versions together, so that Hetfield’s solo still leads into Hammett’s as it does on the CD, but both solos are the extended versions from GH.

Once I’d finished tinkering with it, I burned the GH3 version of the album onto a CD, printed off a nice looking label for it, and put it in the CD case with the official disc. One of the nice things about the new Super Jewel boxes is that the spindle is designed to accommodate two CDs as well as it does the one, so keeping both discs in the same box isn’t a problem.

So now that I can hear it properly, what do I think of the new record? It’s awesome. A lot of people are claiming that it sounds like the follow-up to …And Justice For All, and to an extent that’s true, but only in that it could be the missing link between that album and the stuff that followed it. Yes, the record is a return to Metallica’s thrash roots, but in doing so they haven’t forgotten the sense of groove or feel for a hook that characterised the best of their nineties work (and for all that the Loads were inconsistent, there was some great stuff on them alongside the more mediocre fare). Instead it sounds like the band have taken the things they learned in the years since …Justice and found ways to incorporate that into the thrash they used to play. And it works. Like everything Metallica have released since the mid-90s, it’s exceedingly long, but for the first time, it isn’t screaming out for a thorough pruning to get rid of the filler. Whether it’s the fierce All Nightmare Long or the particularly old-school My Apocalypse, the mid-paced groove of Cyanide, or the balladry of The Day That Never Comes or The Unforgiven III, Metallica are really back on form with this record. Without the awful botched everything-in-the-red mix from the CD, it’s even really well-produced. It’s such a shame that such a killer record had to be subjected to such horrible treatment.

Is this up there with Metallica’s eighties output? Well, no, not quite. But to be honest, there isn’t much that is. Is it one of the best albums released this year? Definitely.

There’s something familiar about the track sequencing, though. Track one has a quiet intro leading into a fast, aggressive number. Track four is a gentler song that gets heavier after a bit. And there’s a lengthy instrumental near the end. I’m sure I’ve come across something similar somewhere.