After reading this stupid article about Metallica and remembering exactly how much I hate those guys (and particularly Lars), I decided to fire up my favorite p2p tool and download as much of their new album as I could, burn it on CD and give it away to people. I've been able to download some of the tracks. Some were just old songs renamed. I have successfully downloaded a few of the tracks though, and here's a mini review (keep in mind I haven't bothered following them in years, so I don't know if any of these songs are already released or what)... Valley of Misery: radio-friendly power ballad crap. Vocal harmonies are nice and all, but not in metal. Chains of Pain has a couple of decent guitar riffs and it almost goes for their old sound, but they seem to be trying a little too hard and the lyrics are just dumb. A Time for Hate has a decent riff, but it sounds way too much like a bad Metallica cover band's attempt at an original song. Burn it Down is a decent instrumental which has sort of a campy b horror movie feel to it. Lastly, Dirty Window starts off with a decent riff and then the dorky vocal harmonies of weak-ass lyrics come and ruin it. James' vocals have some wierd effects on them, somewhat remeniscent of ZZ-Top (it works for ZZ-Top but not for Metallica). Anyway, my recommendation is to not spend any money on this piece of crap CD. They're even packaging it with a DVD of a live studio performance of the whole album. That should wind up on the p2p networks as well. If their music was as good as it used to be, they wouldn't need these kinds of gimicks, but they're just doing whatever they can to not let the napster backlash bite them in the ass.