Twenty years of Metallica

After more than 20 years of Metallica, it almost seems like there has been enough of the band. Enough albums, enough drinking, enough touring and especially, enough commercialization. Perhaps these guys ought to take fellow macho man Mark Maguire's advice and burn out instead of fade away from their invisible heavy metal infamy of the 1980s. After Metallica's The Black Album, 1991 would have been the marquee year for the band to leave the limelight. But like Some Kind of Monster — from a cut-rate horror movie — the band seems to never go away. Combining the crunching, repetitive title track from St. Anger, the 8-track album shines with the return to classical Metallica glory with six tracks from the first three albums. Though recorded live in 2003, the band sounds as indestructible as when it composed music in the 1980s.\nDespite the great music from the immortal '80s, the entire album is an advertisement for Metallica's upcoming movie of the same name. Despite a feeling that the musicians sold out long ago, and that the movie is a shameless commercial gimmick, the two trailers actually excited me about maybe seeing the film. It's so easy to consider the men of Metallica as greedy sellouts, but maybe not. Just because the musicians' flame and rage has dimmed considerably from their younger days in the '80s and early '90s, these guys have not yet retired from music, and I can't entirely blame them for that.