Look at it any way you like, but heavy metal has always been a young man's game. While bands and musicians from other genres have been able to age gracefully and even use the process to add extra texture and subtleties to their music (like David Gilmour or Neil Young), it seems that heavy metal inevitably leaves old rockers behind. There are no old metal stars, just pale imitations of their former selves.

The archetypical example of this is Metallica, who in all honesty should have hung up their guitars fifteen years ago, maybe coming out of retirement for the odd reunion show or solo album. However, propelled by forces unknown, they have stuck together, regularly recording and releasing a series of ever more anaemic and embarrassing albums, culminating in 2003's absolutely horrible "St. Anger". "Death Magnetic", their newest offering, claims to take the band back to their heyday (but when has a band that is clearly past their prime not made such a claim), and promises to put Metallica back at the front and centre of the modern metal scene.

It's a goal which the album can barely achieve, although it makes a decent attempt at doing so. It's considerably better than a lot of their recent efforts, although "St. Anger" didn't set the bar very high. It's a documented fact that nine out of ten metal fans would rather be punched repeatedly in the testicles by Mike Tyson than listen to even a second of Frantic. "Death Magnetic" isn't nearly that bad, although it is still in many ways a deeply flawed album.

To start with, all of the loathsome nu-metal influences have been purged from the band's sound, bringing them closer to their classic thrash sound, which is a welcome development. All of the classic elements that you would expect are in here, including extended playtimes on the songs, blistering guitar solos, and riffs that are as loud and brutal as you'd expect from a proper Metallica album. While lyrics were never this band's strong point, they are also a significant improvement on the dreadful effort that they made last time around, and they're inoffensive enough that you can concentrate on banging your head rather than blushing with embarrassment.

There are still problems though. One is the massive overproduction of the entire affair, with the sound being compressed beyond belief, leaving a lot of the guitar work sounding tinny and flat. This completely destroys any nuance in the guitar work, reducing it to a curtain of anonymous white noise in a lot of places. And despite tracks like the excellent ten minute instrumental Suicide and Redemption that occasionally crop up, a lot of these songs sound bloated and full of unnecessary riffs. A good producer would have gone through a lot of these songs and cut them down to four or five minutes apiece, to make them a lot tighter and more effective, but here they are just allowed to wind on aimlessly.

"Death Magnetic" is definitely a step forward from the band, in that they now just sound like a bunch of heavy metal fossils rather than the laughing stocks of the metal world. However, not only does the material here not measure up to the quality of the material on the classic Metallica albums of yesteryear, but it also pales in comparison to the best metal being released now. Given that it's probably too late for the band to quit now, "good enough" albums like this are probably the best that we can hope for from Metallica in the future.