New Metallica Album.com

After emotional induction speeches, five-piece band delivers ‘Master of Puppets,’ ‘Enter Sandman.’

You’ve all probably seen them a couple hundred times. Guitar Hero commercials directed by Brett Ratner, featuring sports stars and supermodels in a parody of Tom Cruise’s famous Risky Business scene. And if you’re like myself, you can’t stand them and immediately change the channel before anyone slides their goofy asses onto the screen.

In preparation for the brand new Guitar Hero: Metallica edition, though, two more commercials were filmed using the same basic premise, but these commercials are actually pretty entertaining.

The first commercial will most likely only be funny to sports fans and college basketball fans. Instead of the mega-star athletes and models, the commercial features legendary (and older) college basketball coaches: Mike Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Rick Pitino, and Bob Knight. After these gentleman do their best Risky Business slide is when Metallica shows up and it gets pretty funny — especially if you’re familiar with Bob Knight and his infamous temper.

The second commercial is all about Metallica and it really needs no description — you just have to watch it.

Guitar hero: Metallica will feature 28 of the band’s songs as well as 21 songs from other bands hand-picked by Metallica such as Alice in Chains, Motörhead, System of a Down, Slayer, Foo Fighters, Judas Priest, Bob Seger, and Lynyrd Skynyrd

Yesterday, Rock Daily was watching the UNC Tar Heels bulldoze the Blake Griffin’s Oklahoma Sooners on their way to a Final Four spot when suddenly a TV time-out led to the above commercial, which left us perplexed for the remaining five minutes of the game. Like previous Guitar Hero ads, famed coaches like Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, UNC’s Roy Williams, Louisville’s Rick Pitino and noted hothead Bobby Knight donned tidy-whities while paying homage to Risky Business, fake-playing Guitar Hero to Bob Seger’s “Old-Time Rock N’ Roll” just like Michael Phelps, Alex Rodriguez, American Idol finalists David Cook and Archuleta and Heidi Klum before them.

However, the curve ball here is an out-of-nowhere appearance by Metallica, whose own Guitar Hero game was released yesterday (Rock Daily talked to James Hetfield about the game at SXSW.) Together, the juxtaposition of college coaches and heavy metal icons make for the strangest pairing ever in a commercial. We get it, March Madness is going on, Metallica has a game out, but the whole synergy just seems so weird, especially when James Hetfield says, “It means you’re gonna have to put on some pants, pops.” Still, we can watch Rick Pitino cluelessly play drums with only one hand all day, so someone please make a .gif out of that.

This unique 2 DVD and book set draws on rare documentary footage of Metallica in performance and on tour, including their legendary performance at Woodstock, alongside the candid reflections of Lars Ulrich, James Hetfield and Jason Newstead. Other themes explored in the film include the changing line-ups and personnel upheavals with Metallica, and we also hear directly from Newstead himself on why he finally quit the band. This compelling film review is drawn from Metallica’s own promotional interviews, television and radio archives. Tracks featured include: “One,” “Seek & Destroy,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “Fade To Black,” “Enter Sandman,” and more.

To hear him tell it, Metallica’s James Hetfield wasn’t even aware that his band was eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It took Black Sabbath for him to realize it.

“I never thought much about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until we were approached to induct Black Sabbath in 2006, and then they asked us to play, which was like, ‘OK … we will!’ ” Hetfield laughed, talking to MTV News shortly before taking the stage for a “secret” SXSW Metallica set. “So we were there, and then they were saying, ‘You know, you guys are up for this in a few years.’ And I went, ‘Wow, really?’ And I started doing the math … ‘OK, 25 years after our first record … yeah, it’s now.’ And my first thought was ‘Man, it’s gone by very quickly.’ “

And so, when the Hall came calling earlier this year to tell Metallica that they’d made the cut, Hetfield wasn’t exactly surprised. But he was humbled.

“It’s very cool. I think we’ve paid our dues, and we’ve got a few fans who probably think the same thing,” he said. “There’s a lot of gratitude around it, the fact that we were acknowledged, and that, hopefully, we can help get some heavy music in. [Ideally] we’d kick the door open even further for some friends of ours — we’ve got a lot of friends that want to come in and be noted and represent a big part of rock and roll history.”

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The German-language television network 3SAT recently conducted an interview with METALLICA guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield about the band’s new album, “Death Magnetic”, the “Some Kind of Monster” movie and the use of METALLICA’s music to torture Guantanamo Bay, Cuba prisoners. “Part of me is proud is because they chose METALLICA,” Hetfield said about the reports that the band’s song “Enter Sandman” was used during the interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani — known as the 20th hijacker on Sept. 11 — and that listening to the track brought al-Qahtani to tears “because he thought he was hearing the sound of Satan.” James added, “It’s strong; it’s music that’s powerful. It represents something that they don’t like — maybe freedom, aggression… I don’t know… freedom of speech. And then part of me is kind of bummed about it that people worry about us being attached to some political statement because of that. We’ve got nothing to do with this and we’re trying to be as apolitical as possible, ’cause I think politics and music, at least for us, don’t mix. It separates people, [and] we wanna bring people together. So, so be it. I can’t say ‘Stop.’ I can’t say ‘Do it.’ It is just a thing — it’s not good or bad.”

Watch 3SAT’s entire 26-minute chat with Hetfield in three parts. (more…)

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich has commented on the premature release of the band’s new album, “Death Magnetic”, via a French record store. A shop in Paris reportedly sold a number of copies of the CD this morning well ahead of its official September 12 worldwide release date — with illegal “Death Magnetic” MP3 files making their way online by this afternoon.

During a guest appearance earlier today on “The Woody Show” on the San Francisco, California radio station Live 105 (KITS 105.3 FM), Ulrich stated about the French leak, “Listen, we’re ten days from release. I mean, from here, we’re golden. If this thing leaks all over the world today or tomorrow, happy days. Happy days. Trust me. Ten days out and it hasn’t quote-unquote fallen off the truck yet? Everybody’s happy. It’s 2008 and it’s part of how it is these days, so it’s fine. We’re happy.”

Watch video footage of Ulrich’s appearance on “The Woody Show” in two parts below.

Part I,  Part II

We’ve already lived through “The Day That Never Comes” — in the studio and live. So this is the third time it has never come. Something like that. The stitched together, eight-and-a-half-minute, Metallica-sampling Metallica epic gets a high budget, short-film style video today, set in a region of California made up like an American-occupied Islamic state, with soldiers very freaked out by a woman in a burka. Lars writes:

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