Album Review: Super Collider by Megadeth

Megadeth's 14th studio outing finds the venerable metal outfit parting ways with Roadrunner Records, but not with producer Johnny K (Disturbed, Staind), who brought some much needed sonic heft to 2011's Th1rt3en. Super Collider is indeed big and beefy, but it’s awfully light on flavor. Things start out promisingly enough with the blistering "Kingmaker," a thrashy, cautionary tale about oxycontin that evokes classic Megadeth, but any residual warm and fuzzy feelings vanish abruptly upon the arrival of the surprisingly out of character title cut, a rote, state fair-ready, light beer-hoisting rocker that sounds like a late-'80s/early-'90s Tesla or AC/DC throwaway (actually, how did Megadeth release an album called Super Collider before AC/DC?), which is exactly the kind of thing that the band has not only avoided, but brazenly stood against since its 1983 inception.

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Review Summary: The sound of complacency.Post-Endgame Megadeth is, flat-out, a confusing mess. The 2009 album saw the band thrashing hard enough for our very own Trey Spencer to hail the album as "Rust in Peace Part 2" and it seemed that the addition of Chris Broderick was a match made in heaven. How could it not be? Chris is, unquestionably, one of the most technically talented guitarists in metal today.

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You just want it to stop: Megadeth's Dave Mustaine's constant and very public falling apart at the seams. The man is the biggest train wreck in metal, our collective hearts breaking over his most recent shenanigan. And the band — the tunes — well, for a number of albums now he's been in a strange zone where a record drops and we say, "Wow, that's actually not bad," then totally forget anything about the damn thing, except that it resolutely wasn't a "return to form" like the man had promised.

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After the double platinum success of 1992’s Countdown to Extinction, it’s fair to say Megadeth entered into lengthy periods of creative blight during the dying years of the ‘90s and most of the decade that followed. But the release of 2009’s Endgame revealed a revitalized and focused Megadeth intent on showing the world why it was regarded as one of the four thrash metal pillars upon which the genre was built during the late ‘80s. It seemed as if Dave Mustaine had put all of the personal and professional drama behind him, and with original Megadeth bassist Dave Ellefson rejoining the band in 2010, and drummer Shawn Drover and guitarist Chris Broderick providing their expertise, Megadeth became truly relevant again.

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