VINYL FORMAT. Just as U2 re-embraced their essential U2-ness post-Pop, this album is Metallica becoming Metallica again - specifically, the epic, speed-obsessed version from the band's template-setting trilogy of mid-Eighties albums: Master of Puppets, Ride the Lightning and, especially, the progged-out And Justice for All. That much is clear from the 90-second mark of Death Magnetic's first track, "That Was Just Your Life," where the band unleashes a barrage of James Hetfield's dutta-duh-duhnt riffing and Lars Ulrich's octuple-time double-bass-and-snare smashing. That long-vanished sound, as essential to Metallica as variations on the "Start Me Up" riff are to the Stones, is all over the album - you wonder how these fortysomething dudes are going to handle playing it live night after night. (Enter chiropractor.) -rollingstone.com