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Single Review: Metallica – Hardwired (2016)

Is Metallica back? We won’t know until we hear the full album because the title-track of Hardwired… To Self-Destruct is the band doing everything that made them great, but like Death Magnetic it does sound like they’re trying too hard to invoke the fire that was doused long ago.

Of course the ‘Tallica can write amazing songs; they have a whole bunch of them even in Load and Reload but surely we don’t expect a group of men who have already achieved everything they wanted and a lot more to have anything other than personal pain to make songs about. Hey, what kind of angst about what’s wrong with the world would you write about if you had a fucking big house with vintage cars and spent a lot of time in your swimming pool with fancy cigars and the finest alcohol and everything else money can buy?

I don’t grudge Metallica their success; I fucking love them more than anybody else I know, but I also recognize soulless music when I hear it. It’s not hard to tell when a band is pretending to be affected by or even concerned about problems that’ll never touch them. I catch Indian metal bands bullshitting all the time, and hell, even Slayer has written some laughable lyrics. Kerry King concerned about oil wars, really? Even Megadeth gets tiring with Dave Mustaine singing way too much about politics than he should, and he’s another dude who really needs to go vegan.

So what does Hardwired have? The riffing from Kill ‘Em All with the sound Metallica is now known for. They’ve pumped themselves up and Kirk Hammett has been made to play a solo that makes me wonder if it was Megadeth’s latest album that made these four want to see if their old fans would come back if they did this. The lyrics are terrible, as if they were written by James Hetfield’s clone in Mumbai who doesn’t deserve more of a mention than this. Read the lyrics and you’ll see them pissing on Fight Fire with Fire, perhaps trying to extinguish that as well.

I’ll take Low Man’s Lyric over Hardwired (and Lords of Summer – ha!) any day, but I look forward to the new album anyway; if nothing else it’ll make for a few more conversations about the Big 3 (Anthrax has no place in a discussion about great bands) over several glasses of whatever you drink.

Rating: 2.5/5

SEE: James Hetfield in Mumbai

Album Review: Burzum’s The Ways of Yore

 

 

 

Restaurant Review: Global Fusion

If you’re in Mumbai and want to try sushi, Global Fusion is the place to rush to. For a fixed price, you can stuff yourself as much you want, and if you don’t like raw fish, you’ll find many other things to eat. The restaurant is huge, and you can walk around and look at all the food on display. The starters and select soups (which need to be prepared) will be brought to your table (you can try all the soups and all the starters, and they’re enough to fill your stomach), and the food that’s ready (some soups and the main courses), you’ll have to bring back to your table. The starters and soups are kick-ass, and there’s a lot of variety even for vegetarians and vegans. The Chinese main course is strictly okay, and the sushi… well, you’ll have a blast if you like it. I didn’t like the sushi or the sashimi or the tataki – actually, I fucking hated it, and tasted a little of everything because I knew at first bite that I wasn’t going to go near sushi again. Doesn’t Japanese cuisine have beef or pork? Again, there are vegetarian/vegan options if you don’t eat meat, but I bet even they suck. There’s California Roll Maki and Avocado Maki and many other makis and all of them should be called Teri Maa Ki. There’s unlimited packaged water and soft drinks and you’ll need lots of it to wash down the sashimi, because it’ll look really bad if you spit it out. It was great to sit by the fountain pond looking at the frog statues spout water at real fish, and eat those amazing starters, drink those great soups and have all that sweet shit for dessert, but I won’t be scurrying back to Global Fusion for sushi/sashimi/tataki anytime soon. And I wouldn’t offer wasabi even to my enemies. Let me say it in Gujarati… Su? Sheee!

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