Metallica had been disappointing its oldest fans for 20 years, from the alt-rock tragedies of Load and Reload to the supposed “back to their roots” album St. Anger. Now they were to release a “back to their roots, for real this time” masterpiece, but it was hard to believe this would not be non-musical sludgefest. Thankfully, the band have surprised by legitimately making an album in the vein of their 80s work without (for the most part) sounding like they simply re-recorded their earlier material.

The introduction to “This Was Just Your Life” starts the album off right with swirling guitars anchored by the gentle pulse of a supposed heartbeat, and when Hetfield’s crushing rhythm guitar comes in you know this is going to be classic Metallica sound. Then just a few minutes later the riff changes over to the sort of boiling thrash that characterized Kill ‘Em All and removes any doubt. Kirk Hammett’s solo is rather by the book, but built of the sort of frenetic arpeggiation that fits such a barreling song. Just to hear any lead guitar at all is, after the St. Anger debacle, a treat.

On “The End Of The Line” the band sacrifices a few ticks off the metronome marking to lay into a nice metal groove but continues to delight. “Broken, Beat & Scarred” starts good and gets better still when a monster riff and eventual solo break out around 3:55.

The fourth track, “The Day That Never Comes”, begins with one of the band’s best non-metal rock sections, and Hetfield puts the singing skills he gained during the band’s alt-rock years to good use. The song moves into a midtempo metal section that works, but eventually gives way to a riff that rapidly alternates between two notes and is annoying. Hammett’s major solo on this song especially sounds like a conglomeration of all the work he has done before, borrowing heavily from “Creeping Death” and adding bits and pieces from many of his other masterpieces. Despite these two flaws, the song does end with quite a bang.

“All Nightmare Long” and “My Apocalypse” are two more great blistering thrash songs that could easily have appeared on Master Of Puppets or … And Justice For All. “Cyanide” and “The Judas Kiss” are also good, though built on a more mainstream metal sound.

The piano intro on “The Unforgiven III” is a nice change of pace, but like its two predecessors the song does not make much of an impact. Hammett partially redeems it with a decent solo. Previous instrumentals by the band have been so good, but “Suicide & Redemption” is a bit of a disappointment. The progression of riffs is certainly worthy of head-banging, but the band plays in unison too often. What made “The Call Of Ktulu” great was all of the interaction of different parts.

There are flaws on this album, for sure. The seventh track could have been dropped and the ninth expanded, but most of the compositions are solid. Trujillos’s bass is mostly buried, and the band really needs to get over this initiation ritual for new bassists that only hurts the listeners. Hetfield’s lyrics are not as potent as they once were, but that was never my focus in the music anyway. If you like progressive compositions, riffs that will pummel your ears while making it nearly impossible to keep still, and technically excellent leads, you will love Death Magnetic.

Pop-metal is a guilty pleasure for me, and this album by the boys from Jersey is a primary reason for that. The first two singles, “You Give Love A Bad Name” and “Livin’ On A Prayer”, may be the best songs to come out of mainstream music in the 80s. The rest of the tracks are rather less impressive, but the whole still stands as a monument to the genre.

The opener, “Let It Rock” is the kind of song of which every band needs one to open their shows and get the crowd fired up, short on substance but hard rocking. “You Give Love A Bad Name” is just exquisite pop, from the vocal intro, through the hooky main riff and alternating muted and squealing guitar through the verses, to the sing-along quality of the melody and the vocal chorus break after the guitar solo.

To realize that Jon Bon Jovi felt “Livin’ On A Prayer” was not good enough for the album is remarkable. In hindsight, it is difficult to see how it could have been anything but a massive hit. The bass and talk box riff draws the listener in, but Bon Jovi’s emphatic delivery, especially through the modulation, and the down-on-his-luck Everyman lyrics are what make it more than a good song.

“Social Disease” has many of the same qualities as the two big singles, but does not resonate with the same greatness. The country-esque “Wanted Dead Or Alive” sort of works as a ballad, but it always leaves me wishing it had ended earlier. The “loaded six-string on my back” analogy sounds trite in 2008, but perhaps it was novel in 1986.

The band gets closest to traditional metal on “Raise Your Hands”, which functions quite similarly to “Let It Rock”. The band’s schmaltziness works when combined with hard rock pretensions, but when left on its own in the ballads “Without Love” and “Never Say Goodbye” it becomes painful. “I’d Die For You” starts out as a good tune, but gets bogged down in a middle section that reeks of the sort of sugary sweetness discussed above. Thankfully, the band closes out with “Wild In The Streets”, a pleasingly straightforward rocker.

Only the title track, “D. T.”, and “Chase The Ace” are new on Who Made Who. “Who Made Who” is classic AC/DC hard-rocking minimalism and the instrumentals are enjoyable, but it is not enough to make this disc a worthwhile investment. Also, the grammarian in me wants to scream “It’s Who Made Whom!”

After the fantastic Back In Black and international release of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, For Those About To Rock is a disappointment. The sentiment of honoring the fans in the title track is noble, but musically the song is flat until the double-time section. “Snowballed” is built on a classic driving riff and “Night Of The Long Knives” is solid, but the rest of the album seems formulaic and flat. None of the songs are bad, but they would have been filler on either of the band’s previous two albums. One of the band’s best trademarks has been their euphemistic wordplay, but the closest thing to that here is interpreting the familiar acronym “C. O. D.” as “Care Of The Devil”. For Those About To Rock marks the end of a series of great albums and ushers in a very long era of mediocrity for AC/DC.

That I made it so far in my life of geekery without having read this masterpiece is foolish; it is the source document for half of the in-jokes in my profession and hobbies. There are many memes that I knew came from HHGG, but my appreciation for them has increased significantly now that I actually understand their provenance.

As for the book itself, it is built on the same sort of absurd-but-entirely-logical fabric as Catch-22, but with a persistent undertone of silliness. When Adams is describing Bistromathics, the Whole General Sort Of Mishmash, or the Improbability Drive, you wonder how anyone could have such a fertile imagination. The first three books are significantly better than the last two, but all five are worth reading. Adams is deserving of credit for a daring ending to Mostly Harmless.

A literary milestone this is not, but it is a froodily entertaining read and entirely deserves its cult following. And yet, I could very easily see a line of publishers all rejecting this work as rubbish. Had it not been successful as a radio script first, I suspect it never would have seen the light of day.

The End Of Faith is a frustrating book, mixing important facts and keen insight with misinformation, appeals to fear, insults, and almost willful misunderstanding. Harris’s fundamental thesis is that faith by his definition — the willingness to believe something in spite of a lack of evidence or even an abundance of counter-evidence — is irrational, and that irrational people currently have the technology to cause wanton destruction if their beliefs inspire such actions (chapters 1-2). His secondary theorem is that the major religions of the world can indeed inspire violence, that they have done so frequently in the past, and that they are continuing to do so in the present (chapters 3-5). The corollary is, of course, that the continued existence of the world as we know it depends on faith in these religions and anything else being abandoned. The remainder of the book sets forth a proposal that Buddhism and other spiritual practices that are not belief-based can provide the benefits of religions without their drawbacks.

The second part of the first claim is undeniable; there do indeed exist weapons with which a single moderately wealthy person can threaten the lives of billions, and enough of these weapons in existence to destroy all remnants of modern civilization. The first part is also fairly straightforward, although the lines between what is believed due to personal experience (acorns fall from oak trees), what is believed due to consensus among people who claim to have directly observed them (all matter is made of atoms), and what is believed because it has been passed down through many generations from those who claimed direct observation (a man named Noah, his extended family, and the livestock they took into their boat were the only land-borne survivors of an ancient flood) is quite fuzzy. Harris admits that most of what we “know” must be taken on faith in a sense, because no person can possibly experience everything (pages 73-77). However, he makes a reasonable distinction between those things that have been independently verified by large numbers of people and those that could not possibly be verified by anyone currently living. He also points out that beliefs not supported by evidence need not be religious in the usual sense, and also include everything from the superiority of Aryans to UFO sightings (pages 241-242).

My complaint is primarily with the second theorem, regarding the tendency of the major faith-based religions to inspire violence in their followers. At times Harris places the blame not on any specific belief but on the general concept of the supernatural, as in “Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.” (page 13) In other parts he looks at specific scriptural references, such as the 13th chapter of Deuteronomy (page 18), a text common to all of his favorite punching bags: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile this commandment to put to death anyone who attempts to lead one from his religion with what claim to be religions of love and peace. What Harris and no doubt many others fail to do is to understand the passage within its proper context. If the early Israelites had not dealt so harshly with such people, it seems highly unlikely that they would exist today as an ethnicity, religion, or even footnote in a history book. Whether this cultural cohesion was worth the lives it likely cost is an interesting question, but the important point is that no one with authority in any mainstream religion interprets this passage as a practice that should be continued today.

In fact, Harris uses this to push the idea that religious moderation — which to him means holding religious beliefs without going on a murderous rampage — is a result of either ignorance of religion, or a lack of real faith. See page 17, “Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world.”, or page 21, “Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”. Actually, religious moderation is the product of understanding religious texts rather than simply assuming an interpretation that furthers your own world view. In fact, Harris finds that our scriptures are almost entirely inflammatory, as seen on page 35: “God has given us far more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek” and 78: “A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages. It is only by the most acrobatic avoidance of passages whose canonicity has never been in doubt that we can escape murdering one another outright for the glory of God.”

He then goes on to describe several specific instances of people behaving badly due to their faith. In chapter 3 he starts with the Inquisition of heretics and trials of suspected witches in Medieval Europe. The first is indeed a black mark on the history of the Catholic church, and a lesson we would do well to avoid forgetting. The second was, I believe, a largely secular phenomenon. It does require belief in the supernatural to believe that someone has put a curse on you or otherwise use supernatural powers in a way that is destructive to society. Based on the scientific understanding held by the common people at the time, however, I am not sure that their conclusions were not reasonable. One needs only to look as far back as McCarthyism to find a similar case of a fearful populace sacrificing some of their members for what they think will be the good of the whole, and the HUAC had no religious affiliation.

The second half of chapter 3 discusses anti-Semitism and, absurdly, lays the blame for the Holocaust at the feet of the Christian church (page 79). It is certainly true that followers of Christianity and Judaism have not always been charitable toward each other, and that the Christian church is largely at fault for that. Why has this been the case? On pages 92-93 Harris asserts that it is endemic to Christian doctrine: “Anti-Semitism is as integral to church doctrine as the flying buttress is to a Gothic cathedral … anti-semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God’s initial revelation. Christians generally also believe that the Jews murdered Christ …”. The first part of this is at least partly true: Christians do believe that their religion is the continuation of Judaism, and that non-Messianic Jews are missing the most important thing to have ever happened in their religion. The second part, however, requires a complete and utter lack of understanding of theology. According to Christian doctrine, Christ chose to die so that He could mitigate the justice required by the sins of every man, woman, and child ever born. It happens that the people who had the authority to have Him arrested and who convinced the Roman authorities to execute Him were Jews, but that does not place blame for the act on every Jewish person ever born. Even if it did, it would only mean that all Jews are responsible for assisting in the greatest miracle of Christianity.

This is not the only case in which Harris’s understanding of the fundamentals of Christianity is severely flawed. On page 95 he mentions in passing that the doctrine that Jesus was born to the virgin Mary causes the church to view sexuality as sinful. There is a kernel of truth here: Christianity does generally hold that sexuality can be used in sinful ways, such as adultery. If Christian thought holds that sex itself is sinful, however, the continued growth of the population would demonstrate that the church takes its position rather lightly. In fact, this is far from the truth. More important, however, is the ridiculous assertion that any hostility toward sexuality would have arisen as a response to the virgin birth. The reason that Jesus was to be born of a virgin is quite clear, and it has nothing to do with sex being immoral. Rather, it was important to demonstrate the belief that Jesus was the offspring of both God and man.

On page 97 he continues to misinterpret, taking a quotation from John 8 in which Jesus was speaking to a group of Jews (being a Jewish person living in a Jewish land, this described pretty much any conversation He ever had), and acting as though it applies to all Jewish people throughout time and space. In any case, it is the portrayal of the Holocaust as a situation created by Christianity that is most galling. In general, his thesis rests on the proposition that the Nazis would not have been able to convince the general populace to support their murderous schemes if centuries of religious anti-Semitism had not conditioned them to already hate people of Jewish faith. I am not qualified to discuss the extent to which this may be accurate, but even if it is true Christianity is still neither the proximate nor the ultimate cause of the Holocaust. It is true that people around the world in general and Christians in specific were callously negligent in their unwillingness to held European Jews, and that may be the saddest part of the whole terrible affair.

Chapter 4 continues by moving from Christianity through history to Islam in the present day. I am much less capable of pointing out the errors regarding Islam in the book, but I have little doubt that it is equally replete with them. I hope to find a Muslim scholar to analyze Harris’s statements here as I have done for chapter 3. I do know that when Harris claims that religious differences are the root cause of Middle East violence (page 109) he has much to explain. It would certainly be easier if Jews and Muslims did not both consider Jerusalem sacred, but the political and economic challenges in the region are significant enough that it seems very unlikely that violence is caused solely, or even primarily, by religion. He similarly claims that The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a primarily religious phenomenon (page 26). Again, I am no expert in these matters, but I must disagree. The factions that terrorized Northern Ireland did split on religious lines, but the battle was about political ties to Britain and age-old hatred and mistrust, not theology. Consider also the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in present-day Iraq. Is this really about the succession of Muhammad’s relatives, or is it more likely about two groups that fear political marginalization by the other and have centuries of such history to guide them?

Chapter 5 discusses how religion, and particularly Christianity, are currently affecting the United States. There have been a great deal of legislation passed in misguided attempts to force everyone to follow the morality of Christianity or to otherwise restrict the actions of people outside the mainstream. Blue laws, the war on drugs, bans on stem-cell research, and “protection of marriage” laws all fall more or less into this category and, for the most part, I have been a bitter opponent of each of them. I cannot deny that Christians have been the primary supporters of these laws, but nor can I see how they are a real reflection of a Christian worldview.

Chapter 6, entitled “A Science Of Good And Evil”, is about as scientific as intelligent design, and I will not discuss it further. The final chapter discusses consciousness, mysticism, and the supernatural, and proposes that all of the good things that have been found coincident with religion are actually a result of spirituality. He goes on to say that spirituality is the process of escaping the self, and that ancient Eastern philosophy allows us to have this experience without requiring any particular beliefs about the world. I have little to comment about this either.

The Art Of Drowning is not much of an evolution from their previous recordings, but no change was necessary. In fact, the later albums that moved to a more mainstream alt-rock style are quite inferior. “Of Greetings And Goodbyes” is my favorite track.

That Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap was not released in the U. S. until 1981 is a remarkable shame. (The tracks on it were recorded in 1976 or, in some cases, earlier.) The album stands with Highway To Hell and Back In Black as AC/DC’s finest work.

The title track, with its stop-time rhythm part, sing-along chorus, and lyrics about a miscreant for hire, starts off very strong, although the background singing or heavy breathing or whatever you might call it through the verses is quite distracting. “Love At First Feel” is a good song, but unremarkable other than the clever title and Scott’s slimy way of singing about his underage mistress.

Almost all of AC/DC’s music uses delightful euphemistic imagery, but “Big Balls” takes it to an entirely different level. It actually is not a terrible tune, but only Bon Scott could pull it off so well. Along with Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-Ling”, “Big Balls” shares this critic’s prize for best songs about the male genitalia.

“Rocker” is short, sweet, and one of the most frenetic songs the band ever recorded. While they do better utilizing space in mid-tempo tunes, nothing else will get you moving quite like this does. The false ending is a nice touch. “Problem Child” uses a signature riff and the familiar theme of the singer as a bad, bad man well. “There’s Gonna Be Some Rockin’” and “Ain’t No Fun (Waiting ‘round To Be A Millionaire)” are ok, but do not rise to the leve of the rest of the material.

The band changes the vibe entirely for “Ride On”, shifting to an uncharacteristic slow, understated ballad-like feel. This sounds like it would fail spectacularly, but the slow, sinister accompaniment and Scott’s mournful singing are actually quite effective.

The closing song, “Squealer”, may be the best part of the disc. Like “The Jack”, “Whole Lotta Rosie”, “Love At First Feel”, and many other AC/DC songs, it chronicles a sexual exploit, in this case one with an especially enthusiastic virgin. The song builds from a rocking snaky bassline, adds simple but powerful guitar chords, and then explodes into an extended, orgasmic guitar solo. Not a bad formula for a hard-partying rock & roll song, or the entire album.

Shut Your Mouth And Open Your Eyes continues the hardcore formula used by AFI on their previous albums. The result is, unfortunately, nothing spectacular.

Back In Black is the fantastic album that you would expect the second highest seller of all time to be. Despite the death of Bon Scott, the band picks up exactly where they left off on Highway To Hell, adding a bit more pop sensibility and slicker production. In spite of those changes, Back In Black still rocks harder than anything written by most bands. Truly, no one else writes rock & roll quite like this. “Back In Black” and “You Shook Me All Night Long” are among the finest songs the Young brothers have ever written, and “Hells Bells” and “Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” are quite good as well. In fact, the weakest track on the disc is “Shake A Leg”, which could easily have been the standout track on a good album.

Brian Johnson does not quite have Bon Scott’s growling vocals down, but his own singing style complements the band’s high voltage riffing nearly as well and is much more suited to the mainstream audience that this album brought them. What the band does not lose with Johnson is Scott’s sense of debauchery and deliciously euphemistic, barely veiled sexual imagery. “Have A Drink On Me” asserts that the hard-partying band is unrepentant after the alcohol related death of their late vocalist, while “Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” continues the band’s tradition of songs glorifying the music itself. You just can’t find double entendre like “Let me put my love into you, babe / Let me put my love on the line / Let me put my love into you, babe / Let me cut your cake with my knife” and “She’s using her head again / I’m just givin’ the dog a bone” (one can only hope the “dog” is as figurative as the “bone” surely is) anywhere else.

The riffs are, as always, some of the heaviest boogie-rock around, and the generally stripped-down arrangements highlight them well. A good test for a supposed expert in hard rock is to tell “Hells Bells” from Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” based on only their opening bell peals. An absolute classic from a true classic band.