I'm not. It was so... blasé. If that's their best offering for the album, it'll be even more vanilla than St. Anger.
St. Anger wasn't Vanilla. It was like...plain yogurt with a little mold growing on the top. Not bad if you scrape off the bad part, but still sort of lacking.
I enjoyed the new release, but hey. I've learned to run with whatever direction the boys decide to take. They want to branch out into weird art stuff? Gauge them on that. Go back to thrash? Sure, why not!
I liked the direction they were going in with Load and Reload. The songs were more melodic, but they were still raw and fueled by emotion. The songs were complicated and were reaching new heights of nuance.
Then the fanboys whined and Metallica had a relapse (St. Anger). Lars replaced his drum machine with a lead pipe and Kirk decided he'd kick back and take it real easy that whole album. Since then, they haven't been able to really achieve greatness (well, my opinion, anyway).
I'll give it a listen in November, but right now I'm still not convinced.