Coffin Shaker: Megadeth – Dystopia

So, I am having a problem with this album. A number of problems, honestly, on a number of levels. I love Megadeth, and I always have. I’ve remained a faithful fan during their low points, their AOR phase(s) that seems to come and go, their commercialization attempts and the eventual failures of those attempts, and the subsequent attempts at returning to original form. 

Dystopia is reportedly one of those returns to form following an alleged failure with 2013’s Supercollider.  I didn’t think that album was a failure, but I am also pretty hard pressed to recall any of the songs from it, save the cover of Thin Lizzy’s “Cold Sweat” which I found outstanding. To be honest, trying to recall individual tracks from the last few Megadeth albums finds me drawing a blank, and that’s not a good segue for me to say that I’ve enjoyed most of the post-2000 output of the band. I once hurt my shoulder vigorously air guitaring to The System Has Failed.

 

Dystopia has everything that a post-2000 Megadeth album is required to have. Vic Rattlehead is on the cover (maybe that’s why people think Supercollider was a dud…..), there are political songs (“The Threat is Real,” “Dystopia’” “Lying in State,” “Post American World”) and there are tough guy, ‘I will kick your ass’ songs (“Look Who’s Talking”), there are songs that could go either way but whose real direction is kind of unclear (“The Emperor”). 

Musically, a lot of the songs have a lot to like. Right away, something that just leaps out of the sound at you is the drumming, Chris Adler of Lamb of God handling that, and man is it solid. The bass drums sound excellent, and they are stead and strong. The guitar work is really excellent at times as well, and at other times does devolve into that neo-Megadeth style of more melodic, less thrashy licks that move a song along but don’t really do much to get you excited. In fact, guitar-wise Dystopia at times seems like half an album of good ideas and good songwriting, and half an album of other songs; again, a pretty standard post-2000 Megadeth effort. There are a few moments on this where Dave Ellefson cranks out a few seconds of bass that deserve (at least for the moment) to be considered alongside the classic line that opens “Pease Sells . . . But Who’s Buying?”. 

But there are problems here. This album has just been released, and I’ve yet to see anyone review it that has not brought up some of the lyrics, and I’m having issues with them as well.

One thing that had always set Megadeth apart from a lot of the other 80’s thrash and metal bands in general was Mustaine’s lyrical content, which at times got pretty political but never seemed to take one side of the American political divide over the other. Classic Megadeth albums dealt with war and governmental dishonesty and control, but the finger was always pointed at Government, regardless of who was at the top. Even if you discredit the fact that “Hangar 18” deals with the Roswell Incident and cover up, if you overlook the alien conspiracy theme, you are left with a song that deals with the notion that government covers things up or lies to constituents, or at very least suppresses information, a military industrial complex response to information. Megadeth was thrash metals’ own protest band; Mustaine did promos for Rock the Vote and was an MTV correspondent at the Democratic National Convention. 

Post-2000 Megadeth saw this beginning to change. The protest was still there, but the target of it began to come in to more of a focus. Mustaine wasn’t  raging against The Machine anymore; he was starting to rage against specific machines. Following his coming out as a Christian and subsequent slide to the conservative right, a number of Megadeth songs began to take aim at fairly cliché American political Right targets, probably most clearly on display in the title of 2007’s United Abominations. The title track of that album basically takes the same, tired potshots at the U.N., and is balanced out – if that’s appropriate – by anti-eternal U.S. desert wars tracks, such as “Amerikastan,” highlighting the fact that the post-9/11 conflict world wasn’t just something that was happening over there, but was also drawing battle lines right here at home. It doesn’t matter what my own personal assessment of the topics is or was, Mustaine was fair. Mustaine had almost always been fair, in all things save his seemingly endless ire at Metallica for their falling out in the early 80’s. But Mustaine was fair with his targets in 2007. The ‘global domination U.N.’ conspiracy; the endless and fraudulent ‘righteous wars’ following the tragedy of 9/11. Subsequent albums would all have some conspiracy, New World Order-themed tracks, to the point that I at least would read a tracklisting for a new Megadeth album and just sort of grin; “Oh Dave, you and your tinfoil.” 

Those NWO songs were usually tolerable, as they dealt with a phantom, an in-the-distance threat that, by the nature of conspiracy theories, was always right under our noses, oh if only we weren’t so distracted by some pointless media circus or triviality, then we’d be able to see the imminent doom awaiting us – no! the one that is ALREADY here! – that no one is ever able to provide credible evidence for, despite their screeching about how it’s here already and we’re doomed as they try to sell something that will stave off this inevitable ruin for me and my family. 

But it seemed like Mustaine’s angry finger had always been on the general pulse of government-related anger. Here on Dystopia, things get uncomfortably specific, and very, very one-sided.

“The Threat is Real” is about as thinly veiled a diatribe against immigration, and specifically immigration from Middle Eastern countries, as can be. It’s one of those songs that, if you agree with its content, you would call incredibly timely, as its words could have been lifted from the speeches of practically any of the Republican presidential candidates most recent stump speech: vacuous and fear mongering, but hiding behind that laughable veneer of caution. Other songs like the title track and, I must say, the bizarre “Post American World” talk of our blind acceptance of ‘false narratives’ and abandoning the things that have made us a great nation, lamentations of how we as a nation have lost our way and must contemplate the way History will judge us (“Lying in State”). This is where I’m struggling with the album.

False narratives, in case we don’t know, are constructions that seek to hide some kind of truth or shift attention to something that ‘doesn’t matter.’ While this is obviously a real concept, and something that actually works conceptually in terms of something like “Hangar 18,” ‘false narrative’ in certain circles is a dog whistle term that requires a part of our ‘true narrative’ openly, blatantly and completely reject something that we just don’t like. You so desperately hate X to the point that you have determined that X is something used to destroy the pre-X world and replace it with a world which idolizes X to the point that X has become the new religion, and even though this decent into X is happening before our very eyes, you are so smart and so not under the influence of X that you know that X has been the new religion all along. All you have to do is Google ‘false narrative’ and you will drown under examples that claim something is a false narrative because it doesn’t accept as true some thing that another person swears by: the sum total of the modern social world is a false narrative, to some people. Defining the world as the result of false narrative requires a tremendous amount of denial, and perhaps admirably in a really, really perverse way, an unshakable will to keep ones’ self isolated within an imaginary existence, which ironically to the point of making me want to choke to death so as to escape it, creates a REAL false narrative in the mind of the beholder.

Mustaine used to call out this type of thing. Used to. 

Now, it seems he’s set to embrace them. “Post American World” is one of those songs that could, again, have been ghost written by any Republican presidential candidate, lamenting the decline of the United States because things are different today than they were in the romanticized past. I never quite understand if this type of thing is supposed to be a rallying cry or something emboldening, but it always sounds like whining to me. “Content” wise, the song is the same old, same old: we’ve turned our backs on what made us so great, which makes us cower before all of our enemies, apparently; if we’re not kicking asses all over the planet, then we’ve obviously become a shell of what our great empire once was; and of course, the only people who actually think for themselves are those people who are so lock-step with those ideal ideas of the Cold War era, strengthened by the events of 9/11 to not only accept the Orwellian platitude that only eternal War can grant us anything approximating Peace, but to claim that those who don’t support wars against undefined entities for eternity are the ones who are actually trying to support some type of Orwellian Dystopia. 

Dystopia will make its waves for the lyrical content, and that will honestly be more attention than it deserves as an album. Musically, it is a typical, post-2000 Megadeth album. It was promoted as being the ever-elusive ‘return to form’ work, and it has a few moments where there are glimpses of what once was. There are some good riffs and some chunky parts, and a few guitar solos that are good. But then, the return to form is a return to the last twelve years of Megadeth albums: the same tough guy songs, the same except for the lack of slower, ballad-y tunes that have been instant second+ listen skips for over a decade now. There will be some who hear these songs and believe that Mustaine has it right, and again, “timely” will be used to describe the album by those listeners. 

My problem is not that he apparently believes this, because we can all believe what we want. My problem is that Mustaine has made a career out of pointing out bullshit, and has always been critical of the stupidity of this type of ideological following. Here, he seems to have altered that tune, and while no one is ever required to believe the same things from cradle to grave, it just seems odd that a guy who wrote some great, classic jams being critical of the American Industrial Complex is now joining the ranks of those who languish in claims of its alleged destruction: it was horrible that we were the thing we were,  which I deemed bad, but now it’s horrible that I say we are no longer that same thing.

Ultimately, I think my disconnect with this album is driven by fatigue of the pseudo-political posturing in real life that we are bombarded with daily, retread in the lyrics of Dystopia, coupled with the laborious desperation accompanying any new Megadeth album of searching for parts to feel genuine excitement about. In the end, I try to name memorable things about the record, and I keep coming back to little more than irritation over the lyrics of two or three songs, and I can’t say that that is a successful album.