Metallica held a listening party for a handful of bloggers and hard rock news media last week. Naturally, said media went home and started writing about it on the net. Nothing unusual there. Except each review was promptly pulled by the band, despite the majority of them being fairly positive towards the record. Way to alienate your fan base. Again. Cue internet flame wars directed towards the notoriously internet sensitive group. But it appears there was some miscommunication. Or backtracking. Because today the band released this statement via
Metallica.com:
While we occasionally enjoy reading the various comments,
rumors, speculation, reviews, gossip and all the good that the internet
brings, rarely do we feel the desire/need to respond to the
"blogosphere" ... hey, everyone is entitled to have their thoughts and
opinions, right? However, once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few
weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our
managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down
reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on
their sites. Our response was "WHY?!!! Why take down mostly positive
reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched
about the next record ... that makes no sense to us!" So after a few
rounds of managerial ear spank and sentencing everyone at Q Prime to 20
push-ups each, we figured why not take matters into our own hands and
just post the links here on our site. Kerrang, Metal Hammer, The Quietus.
You see, we have maintained an "in the press" section here on
Metallica.com for many years now, posting links to reviews of shows,
album and DVD releases, and various other tidbits we've come across
while surfing around. Some good, some not so good, but we put 'em all
up ... sort of the same way we treat our message boards on this site
... welcoming all feedback.
So in the spirit of keeping this section current, we've put as many
of the reviews of the rough mixes of the new record up here as we could
find. If we missed any, let us know ... and in the meantime, we're
always adding, so peruse at your leisure.Still, that photo. Wonder what Dave Grohl would say?