Released: August 6, 2013
Calling an album Heavy Metal Music and naming the band after yourself leaves nowhere to hide. It also makes the intent almost comically clear. After years of helping define other people’s bands, Newsted finally controlled the songs and produced the record himself. Once he owned the whole process, what kind of metal did Jason Newsted actually want to make?
He had already mapped out the guitar, bass, vocal, and drum-machine parts in GarageBand. Guitarist Jessie Farnsworth and drummer Jesus Mendez Jr. then put their own hands on those demos, while Mike Mushok joined after the Metal EP and widened the guitar sound. The bass spends most of the album fastening those guitars to the drums. Mike Fraser’s mix keeps Newsted’s pick attack audible, especially when it scrapes against Mendez’s kick, but the low end rarely breaks away simply to show off.
“Heroic Dose” lays out the method with a squat, syncopated figure that keeps returning between the vocal lines. The stop-start spaces matter as much as the notes; Newsted’s bass gives each gap a dirty edge. His voice sits in the rough register he once used to reinforce Metallica live, only now the bark has to shape full verses and hooks. He handles that best when the words are short and the rhythm does half the work. “Soldierhead” moves at a quicker gallop, with the bass biting through the downstrokes and Mendez holding a hard, uncomplicated backbeat. Inspired by Pat Tillman, the lyric stays inside a soldier’s disorientation instead of recounting his biography.
Repetition is Newsted’s main songwriting tool. “…As the Crow Flies” switches to a faster run after its broad opening march, then opens a lane for the dual guitars to answer each other. “Ampossible” takes the Mission: Impossible television theme, a childhood favourite of Newsted’s, and mutates its sneaking pulse into a crooked, low-slung riff. “Above All” uses a brighter guitar figure that circles the verse and pulls the song towards hard rock. These shifts help because most of the album lives between a mid-paced stomp and a steady gallop.
The slower material reveals where his approach begins to stall. “Nocturnus,” built from a riff he had kept since the 1990s, stretches past six minutes with slow bends and a doom-sized tread. “Twisted Tail of the Comet,” written for late Voivod guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour, lets the bass move more freely beneath the guitars. The title’s cosmic image connects directly to Piggy’s sci-fi musical world. “Futureality” also drops the pace and makes room for a bluesier lead. Across a 57-minute album, though, Newsted will stay with a riff because he enjoys playing it, even after the arrangement has stopped adding information. “Kindevillusion” has a useful jab in its main pattern, yet each return says roughly the same thing.
His words share that impatience with decoration. Newsted likes compressed phrases, rallying cries, and fused words: “Ampossible,” “Kindevillusion,” “Futureality.” They can be clunky, but they are recognizably his. He wants a phrase that can be shouted on the first pass, just as he wants a riff understood before it repeats. “Soldierhead” and “Twisted Tail of the Comet” gain more weight because their blunt language is tied to real people.
So what kind of metal did Newsted want to make? Something physical, communal and easy to grasp on the first pass: immediate riffs, bass with the pick edge intact, drums planted squarely in the centre and choruses built for a room to shout. His blind spot is just as plain: he sometimes mistakes duration for development. Heavy Metal Music names the genre; the songs supply his definition of it. For Jason Newsted, metal starts with the rhythm section, and everything else has to earn its place on top.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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