April albums: Metallica heals, Shufutinsky chooses adult women

In the music industry, recent months have been marked by the return of luminaries of various genres to the game. Among the mid-April releases, there are also albums from artists who have earned themselves the right to take their time with new releases. MK listens and draws conclusions.

Metallica / 72 Seasons

A full-length Metallica album is something like a big blockbuster, at least in terms of expectations. The musicians did not torment the audience until the very release and indulged in singles, and all of them sounded very promising. During the seven-year break between albums, one could probably come up with a serious revolution, but this was clearly not part of the group’s plans.

Once they tried to do something similar on the album Load (1996), but hard rock instead of thrash and trendy haircuts instead of classic hair were immediately anathema to fans. Since then, Metallica has been extremely careful with experiments and trying to justify the expectations of the public in everything.

It’s not easy, because the public, of course, wants another Master Of Puppets, … And Justice for All or Black Album. None of this is at all on 72 Seasons, primarily because hits of the previous scale clearly did not work out. But there is something else.

The name 72 Seasons refers to the period of the formation of a person who lives from birth to adulthood just seventy-two seasons. All twelve tracks of the album have a certain psychotherapeutic effect. Various crisis situations are worked out in the texts, and the music, although pretty loaded, still gives a chance to understand the harsh beauty of many songs.

From time to time, musicians flirt with their past, apparently they can’t get away from it, but the point here is not so much in the desire to remember the eighties, but in how they win it back. And they play very well. Probably, to imitate youthful enthusiasm, there are now some wise sound processing programs in the studios (purists have already broken all their spears in discussions whether Lars Ulrich uses drum machines when recording drums or everything is fair), but if you don’t fool around with thoughts about world music conspiracy, then we can say that the new Metallica sounds stunningly loud, aggressive and sweeping, in general, as it should sound in an ideal life.

By today’s standards, tracks longer than five, six and even seven minutes seem almost like rock operas. And when some fans complain in their feedback that the band would be nice to hire an editor, such a remark does not seem like a completely bad idea. Perhaps the shortest ones will go with a bang at concerts: Lux AEterna and Too Far Gone?. They have something of thrash in the spirit of the eighties, that is, a prowess that makes hearts beat faster.

However, to write down the rest of the contents of the album in tediousness and graphomania would be, to put it mildly, not fair. Most of these songs, if not immediately, but still get to the heart and mind. The most revealing example from the final Inamorata. A little over eleven minutes of running time and a clear light at the end of this very long tunnel.

Mikhail Shufutinsky / Black on white

In honor of his 75th birthday, the chanson legend released new songs and added remakes of hits from the golden fund to them. It is possible that the most difficult task was to join the songs, between which there are years and distances. In the end, this was largely due to the fact that the artist and his studio team avoided the temptation to make the sound trendy.

In terms of fashion, by the way, Mikhail Zakharovich is far from a blunder. His recent alliance with Yegor Creed has not yet cooled down, as a result of which recitative verses have taken root in the September 3rd meme-hit. The older audience remembers joint tracks with the local hip-hop legend Bad Balance and it must be admitted that the chansonnier there did not look at all like a hopeless retro artist. Shufutinsky is generally much more than that, at one time he led the VIA “Leisya Song”, which clearly hints at high musical qualifications, and turned out to be in chanson more for commercial reasons.

Probably it was the experience that prompted the artist that it is better to restore his own classics a little than rebuild. Still, “For the Lovely Ladies”, “Come to us for a light”, “Odessa-Mama” and other hits are already fundamentally good in their genre and it’s better not to look for good from good. With a similar logic, Shufutinsky approached new songs. It is unlikely that the artist is afraid of unexpected arrangements, rather he is aware that under the lines of Larisa Rubalskaya “I like you, an adult woman with traces of the past years” there is no particular reason to put fashionable basses.

As a result, only good news for fans of Mikhail Zakharovich. All nineteen tracks of the album sound like the perfect accompaniment to a crazy evening in the best NEP restaurant in the city. And the branded hoarseness coupled with cheerful notes is still in place and they feel quite good.