Recent Albums of quality worth mentioning...

After venting my frustrations about some of the poor music released in the last year (one album in particular, obviously) I decided to first of all shorten my rants and secondly to be more positive. With that in mind I thought it appropriate to talk about some of the albums which were equally anticipated but received a warmer response from me.
The first was by a band who in their last outing created such a backlash from fans there were reports of mass burning of the album at bonfires in the States. What kind of music is capable of such wrath, you ask? It is Heavy Metal, of course! The cremated album in reference was Metallicas St. Anger, which stirred up quite an angry broth amongst true fans. The album, along with "making of" documentary Some Kind Of Monster,the bands re-release into the wild seemed a tad pretentious. They needed a big bang to mark their territory as the long reigning lords of metal after the debacle of St. Anger.
The new album Death Magnetic was more than just a bang, it was an explosive scream bursting the eardrum of every pessimistic critic in the land. The album reminds me of a time when Metallica were competing with the likes of Slayer, bringing back the old metal roots of Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning. It is truly a breath of fresh air to a genre clouded in smog music from bands like 30 seconds to Mars. Real metal musicis dying and hardcore followers have to rely on the stuff of old, which to be frank never gets old. Slayer, Pantera and even some older Slipknot would be chosen ahead of Metallica these days, but now the band can realistically hold their heads up high and proclaim, "We are still one of the best". Fast pedals and heavy guitar shredding is all I need to satisfy the metal craving and finally, some original work has come from such a talented band worth banging your head to.
The second appraisal is regarding an album with a very mixed reaction and I am here to tell the negative opinion pushers to pull their stubborn head out of the sand realize the quality of the album. The band is The Prodigy, the album Invaders Must Die. Since its arrival all I have been hearing is they now sound like a sub-standard Pendulum, which is ridiculous based on the opinion that Pendulum are below par in general. As the Market for that style of music is so popular recently, the prodigy are immediately compared to what is current and being labeled based on them sounding different. After Always Outnumbered was released Liam Howelett promised an album which felt like the prodigy of old, and I defy anyone to play Experience/Jilted Generation back to back with the new record without seeing massive similarities. The cold hard truth for those pessimists is that the Prodigy are back at the top of their game with a fresh mix of heavy electro, jungle and drum n' bass music that originally put them in the spotlight all those years ago.