Went to their website and listened to the full album. Or, rather, to as much of each song as I could stand before getting bored. My thoughts.
That Was Just Your Life: Fast and hard, but Hetfield blows chunks.
The End of the Line: Sounds way too similar to the previous track. I mean, with most of Metallica's older tracks, I find it easy to tell them apart. With these two, they sound virtually identical. And Hetfield still sucks.
Broken, Beat and Scarred: Worse and worse.
The Day That Never Comes: This would ordinarily be the second or third single. They forgot the basic order of rock singles. Your first single is something good and hard, then you follow up with a ****ty ballad-like song. And this certainly is ****ty.
All Nightmare Long: ****, where are they getting the names of these songs from? And Hetfield continues to suck. It's like the older he gets, the lamer his vocals get.
Cyanide: When the hell did Metallica start sounding like some ****ty garage death metal band? (though I respect death metal)
The Unforgiven III: Oh, just **** off already. The first one was over-rated enough, the second one wasn't even as good as the first, and now you're doing a ****ing third one? And you make it even ****tier than the others? Dudes, you're just a bunch of ****ing losers now, trying to re-capture your glory days.
The Judas Kiss: Whatever happened to the good old days of Creeping Death? Remember when you wrote Creeping Death? That was awesome. This? Not so much.
Suicide & Redemption: They make it hard to even want to like this album, when they give all the songs these ****ing ******** names. This song does benefit from not having Hetfield's now-awful vocals ****ing it up, but it's still nowhere near as cool as Ktulu or Orion. Those songs had a great feeling. This one just seems like they're showing off how well they play their instruments. The whole album ends up feeling that way.
My Apocalypse: And to close, another ****ty song.
Metallica peaked with Master of Puppets. They've gotten ****tier and ****tier since then, reaching a nadir with St. Anger. While Death Magnetic is better than that musical atrocity, Death Magnetic still sucks. It pales in comparison to Ride the Lightning, or even the Black Album. It sucks because they're trying to reclaim what made them great: namely, playing really fast and really hard. But while that was great when they were in their 20s, that was 20 ****ing years ago. Grow the **** up. Load and Re-Load were good albums (very under-rated, just for the record), because they were more mature than their earlier work. They weren't as good as Lightning or Puppets (I would rank Load and Re-Load 4th and 3rd best Metallica albums, respectively). Then, with St. Anger and this piece of crap, they've tried to regress, and it just ends up sounding crappy and obsolete.
