Something is seriously wrong with Metallica. With all of the available resources (studios, microphones, pre-amps, guitars, engineers — and even the most powerful rock music producer in the world, Rick Rubin), they can’t figure out how to make an album sound professional. Their new single, “The Day That Never Comes” sounds like it was recorded on a cassette tape on a boom box.

Dr. Zoltan estimates that it has been roughly 13,140,000 seconds since a snare drum played by Lars Ulrich sounded correct. Dr. Zoltan also estimates that 13,140,000 amateur musicians in home studios all around the world have had no problem with that basic task. You might expect this sort of thing on a low budget — perhaps with a single Radio Shack microphone stuck in a closet, recorded onto a K-mart tape from 1992, but not considering the unlimited financial resources that Metallica has.

Rather than firing Bob Rock, they should have fired Lars Ulrich. Listen to that hi-hat disaster at 1:13. It is one of those moments where the drummer is not so sure he was supposed to go into that section, and he is ducking under the cymbals and looking around at his bandmates for validation. 

As if that is not wrong enough, the weakest performance of the worst drummer in the world had to be masked by digitally cranking a fancy volume knob akin the the Maximum Volumizer. Mastering? Bah.

The Day That Never Comes is the day that Metallica can remember anything they learned about sounding like non-amateurs.

{ This post was written and scrutinized, perhaps by gnomes licensed in perpetuity throughout the universe by Dr. Zoltan! If you find any scratches or bumps, visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog. Also… }