depending entirely on how you look at it and what you dig, the strangeness of 2016 being the best of times and the worst of times for vibes continues. joining the deaths, the tragedies, the arrests and the amazing music which have all happened this year comes, look you see, the return of Metallica. they caught the world somewhat off guard yesterday by releasing, or if you like "dropping" a new single in the form of Hardwired. this is ahead of a similarly titled double album, but we shall get to it.
actually, we will get to that now. i suspect you would rather all hear of this single and record, should you not be aware of it, than you would rather hear my groans and moans about how inexplicably difficult the world seems to have made it to buy music in an era when so many channels to sell exist.
i first heard the new single - and saw the video - off of a link on one of them facebook things. my initial reaction was "did not disappoint", and my second reaction was "this is smart, this is". and so, with virtually no alternate path to take, i managed to work out how to buy it off of iTunes
yes, that is the scary looking cover for the album, Hardwired.....To Self Destruct you can see, made all the more scary, i believe you will find, by my use of Commodore 64 mode to take the picture with.
speaking of scary, the video is quite terrifying, really. it's back to them doing the best kind of videos for their stuff, which is simplistic and, to use the word again, scary. here's some of it, and indeed here is some of it as it looks when a VHS camcorder is used to film it.
quite, as hopefully you can see in the above, a throwback to their two arguably greatest pop music videos, One and Enter Sandman.
so, the new album comes out in November, and is called Hardwired....To Self Destruct. also, it's a double album no less. this is something which many will be asking questions about, as in why there are not two double albums; i.e Hardwired....To Self Destruct I and Hardwired....To Self Destruct II. again, i say, if someone at Geffen had the balls to say to Axl "let's release all this stuff as four single albums, with one release every two years, rather than two double albums at once", the 90s - and Guns N Roses - would have all been so very different.
whiny bit coming up, folks, so you may want to opt out now.
whilst i have no doubt i will be off to HMV on the day of release to pick up this album, i in the mean time was suitably impressed with what i heard of what has been released to wish to buy it. understanding that there is no physical release of this, or many other, single(s) any more, i went to the online retailers to go and throw 99p at Lars, James and them other two, as if to say "bravo". this was tougher than it should have been.
in the end, as you can see above, i bought it off them twats at Apple, via their iTunes thing. it was by no means an easy thing to do. the only thing they wish for you to do is to pre-order the album in order to get Hardwired downloaded to your account. it takes some searching and digging to find the place on their ludicrous system where you can simply by the song along for 99p.
the official Metallica website? no interest in selling the song alone, alas, and no interest in selling things which are not priced in US$. that's weird, as if nothing else in your eyes then Metallica are probably the number one USA band for knowing, understanding and treating very well the fact that they have a huge fan base outside of North America.
surely, you say, the Google has the single for sale on their Play store? no. i wasn't really confident of finding it there, since they didn't have the songs off of The Stone Roses available at first, but i went and had a look anyway.
as of this morning, then, all Google, the self-anointed kings of the internet, know and care for about a new Metallica release is that someone has shoved some sort of app out there into the universe related to it.
Amazon? Amazon. it's quite depressing to see what Amazon has become. whereas once they were the ones who pioneered better deals for consumers using the power of the internet, now all they champion is higher prices and poor service. still, it was worth a look......
so at this stage as far as Amazon are concerned there are absolutely zero products known to exist or due to be released by Metallica which feature the word, term or name "hardwired". oh. and this is the lot, rather depressingly, who will have exclusive distribution rights to the new Amy Lee album next month. not a good sign that they know or understand music.
i, as regular readers will be aware, really don't care for this "download" stuff over actually holding the vibes you want to play, but so be it, that is the way of the world now. with this being the case, i am truly baffled as to why they make it so bloody difficult to actually buy music released in this way.
the simpler, cheaper and faster way to have obtained the song would have been to either "rip" the audio as an mp3 off the video on You Tube, or otherwise do a direct, less than legal if not quite illegal download of the song off of someone who had "shared" it online. i'd like to believe that there are many like me who would prefer to pay artists for their efforts, but everything about the way the record industry does online sales says "rather just go and get it unofficially please, we really don't want your money".
anyway, Hardwired is a smart, three or so minute splendid exercise in thrash aggression off of Metallica, and is well worth your time hearing via whichever way seems easiest to you.
be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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