Megadeth - Thirteen
On November 1, 2011, "Thirteen", the 13th studio album by "Megadeth", was released. The band itself spelled the title "Th1rt3en".
The album "Thirteen" doesn't pretend to reinvent "Megadeth", and what makes it interesting is exactly that: it sounds like a band opening its closets and pulling out everything it has kept. A year after founding bassist David Ellefson returned to the band, Dave Mustaine gathered almost every version of himself into a single album: riffs written in the early nineties, a song written for a music game, a song written for an action game, and a handful of brand-new songs.
The previous album, "Endgame" from 2009, brought "Megadeth" back to the fast, aggressive sound of its golden years, and it was hard to expect a follow-up to surpass it. The lineup that entered the studio in the spring of 2011 included Mustaine, guitarist Chris Broderick and drummer Shawn Drover, alongside Ellefson, who had been the band's bassist between 1983 and 2002 and now returned to record his first studio album since "The World Needs a Hero" in 2001. The sessions took place at the band's own studio, Vic's Garage in California, and were run by Johnny K, who had previously worked with "Disturbed" and "Sevendust", after producer Andy Sneap, who produced the previous two albums, couldn't free up his schedule.
The number 13 hovered over the process almost comically. Mustaine, who was born on September 13, started playing guitar at 13 and now came out with his 13th album, said he saw the number everywhere, and on the way also complained about car trouble and things that went missing. In the middle of the recording the producer suddenly fell ill and the sessions stopped for a few days, and then work resumed. In the end Mustaine declared that everything was done in record time, but also admitted that the release date worried him a little. On November 1, 1994, the album "Youthanasia" was released, and following the airing of the song "A Tout le Monde" on a TV show that same day, the band was "banned" on MTV.
What makes "Thirteen" almost archaeological is the number of songs that lived earlier in other versions. The song "New World Order" was written in 1991 during the "Clash of the Titans" tour, was released in a finished version on the soundtrack of the game "Duke Nukem" in 1999, and its demo appeared as a bonus on the remastered edition of "Youthanasia" in 2004. It was re-recorded, according to Ellefson, at Drover's insistence, and Mustaine updated parts of it and made them more violent. The song's credits still include two members of the classic lineup: Marty Friedman, who was the guitarist then, as well as Nick Menza, who was the drummer.
The song "Millennium of the Blind" was also written in 1991, and its lyrics, according to Mustaine, were born after watching the movie "Highlander". He said the song reminded him too much of another song he was working on at the time, "Absolution", which later became part of the song "Trust" from the album "Cryptic Writings". The song "Black Swan" was originally meant to be a bonus on a special edition of "United Abominations", and its lyrics, contrary to what you might think, have nothing to do with the film released in 2010 and were born from the book "The Great Divorce" by C. S. Lewis. The main riff of the song "Deadly Nightshade" was written, according to Ellefson, during the recording sessions of "Youthanasia" or "Cryptic Writings".
The album opens with the song "Sudden Death", written for the game "Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock", released as a single back in September 2010 and given a new mix here by Johnny K. It was nominated for a Grammy, and even the BBC Music critic, who wasn't impressed with the album as a whole, called it quite brilliant. After it comes the first single, "Public Enemy No. 1", a song about the gangster Al Capone that the band performed for the first time in Hamburg in July 2011 and later performed in Halloween costumes on Jimmy Kimmel's show. Its video, western-style and featuring real animals, came out in November 2011, and the song won Metal Song of the Year at the Loudwire awards as well as a Grammy nomination. The song "Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)" also received a Grammy nomination, and the band offered it as a free download for 24 hours in October 2011.
Spin magazine wrote of "Public Enemy No. 1" and "Guns, Drugs & Money" that they are surprisingly melodic hard rock, not far from the early classics of Alice Cooper, but without his sense of humor, and added that the song "We the People" deserves a place on the official soundtrack of the apocalypse. Mustaine himself described the sound as a mix of old "Black Sabbath" with a modern edge in the manner of "Queens of the Stone Age", while Broderick said the album is like a cross-section in time of each of the past albums and that parts of it remind him of "Peace Sells... But Who's Buying?" and "Rust In Peace", while Ellefson placed it somewhere near "Countdown to Extinction".
The album is closed by the song "13", an acoustic-based rock song running almost six minutes, which Ellefson described as theatrical and compared to the song "In My Darkest Hour" from the album "So Far, So Good... So What!". According to him, the song sums up the arc of "Megadeth" as a band, and it does sound like the last stop on a tour of its own museum.
Reviews were split. The Guardian wrote that this is a feast of modern metal with no filler, while BBC Music and Metal Forces magazine were disappointed by the simpler, less furious direction. On Metacritic the album received 71 out of 100. Commercially it entered at number 11 on the Billboard 200 with about 42,000 copies in its first week, slightly fewer than the album "Endgame", reached number one on the UK rock and metal chart, and at that year's Loudwire awards was named Metal Album of 2011.
The album "Thirteen" was the last on the band's contract with "Roadrunner Records". Mustaine had complained even earlier that the way they were treated was terrible, and the band did part ways with the label in December 2012. The album "Super Collider" followed in 2013 and was received lukewarmly, and after it came the album "Dystopia" in 2016, considered an important statement of the band's later years.
Fifteen years later, "Thirteen" sounds less like a statement and more like a family portrait: a band that came back to itself, with a bassist who returned home, a bandleader gathering his earlier versions and a new producer at the controls. It is not "Megadeth's" sharpest or most innovative album, and it doesn't try to be. But anyone who wants to hear what a band sounds like when it is comfortable in its own skin after nearly three decades, and knows exactly where it stands in its own history, is invited to give it another chance.
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