Megadeth: Super Collider – new video

Good heavens! I have completely missed MEGADETH's fourteenth album ‘Super Collider’, issued through Dave Mustaine's own label Tradecraft on June 4th, 2013. Met with a largely negative reception by critics, I read, ‘Super Collider’ has nevertheless peaked at position number 4 in Canada and Finland, at number 6 on the Billboard Top 200 (selling 29,000 copies in the U.S. in its first week), and at number 22 on the UK Albums Chart. Produced and mixed by Grammy Award nominated Johnny K and eleven times Grammy Award nominated Dave Mustaine, engineered by Cameron Webb and mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound in New York, as well as featuring guest appearance by DISTURBED's David Draiman, the album should be by now available at your usual music retailers' and if not, turn to Amazon and iTunes. ‘Super Collider’s artwork is based on an existing photograph of the Inner Barrel of the CMS experiment (search for the Higgs particle, additional dimensions and dark matter particles):

[An example of the aforementioned negative reception by critics, heh:] “Also, why is there a painting of Iron Man on the back cover? Things certainly don’t improve with the limp ‘Burn!’, an artless slab of gym metal that finds the normally erudite Dave Mustaine rhyming fire with desire, a desire that “burns hotter than hell”. In fact, outside of ‘Kingmaker’, the banjo-led ROB ZOMBIE-meets-Mark Lanegan [an American alternative rock musician] lament ‘Blackest Crow’ and the outstanding ‘Built For War’, a surprisingly agile, apocalyptic anti-anthem which was co-written with drummer Shawn Drover and guitarist Chris Broderic, the latter of whom supplies the cut with some truly impressive riffage, ‘Super Collider’ is so mired in midtempo drudgery and familiar hard rock (not thrash) tropes that it never really connects,” [wrote James Christopher Monger, AllMusic – more here]

With over 30 million albums sold worldwide, with five consecutive Platinum and multi-Platinum album certifications and eleven Grammy nominations, as well as being easily one of the most recognized names in hard rock music for the past three decades, MEGADETH was formed in 1983 in Los Angeles by guitarist and vocalist Dave Mustaine and bassist David Ellefson. The band has since released fourteen studio albums, three live albums, five compilations, two EPs, forty-four singles, eight video/DVDs, and thirty-three music videos. A pioneer of the American thrash metal movement, MEGADETH rose to international fame in the 1980s and are one of the “Big Four” of thrash metal, along with METALLICA, SLAYER and ANTHRAX. In 2011, MEGADETH released their thirteenth album ‘Th1rt3en’. Released on Roadrunner Records, the album marked the return of bassist Dave Ellefson who was part of the band's classic lineup from 1983 to 2002. ‘Th1rt3en’ debuted at number 11 on the Billboard Top 200 chart and has sold about 120,000 copies in the United States in its first year. Three tracks off the album, ‘Sudden Death’, ‘Public Enemy No. 1’ and ‘Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)’ were nominated for Grammy in “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance” category at the 55th and 54th Grammy awards respectively, and ‘Sudden Death’ was nominated for “Best Metal Performance” at the 53rd Grammy awards:

“Darker, heavier, and more immediate than 2009's ‘Endgame’, Dave Mustaine's snarling vocals ride higher in the mix this time around, but fans need not fear, as his fleet fingers are still possessed with the power to conjure the dead. … The melodic slow-burn ‘Millennium Of The Blind’ fuses TEN YEARS AFTER's [British blues-rock quartet] ‘I’d Love To Change The World’ and METALLICA's ‘Fade To Black’ into an anti-corporation/war rant that calls out the “millennials” on their submissiveness, the snaky ‘Black Swan’ casts long shadows that mimic ‘Symphony Of Destruction’, and first single ‘Sudden Death’ stands defiant before the skeptics who thought that Mustaine's newfound faith would render him bereft of the old ultraviolence,” [commented James Christopher Monger, AllMusic – more here]

MEGADETH features: Dave Mustaine – vocals and guitar, Chris Broderick – guitar, Dave Ellefson – bass and Shawn Drover – drums