At the beginning of the year I made it my mission to bring you the lively, thoughtful, witty commentary that has won me five readers, three times a week. However this morning I did not have a fresh post for you, despite plenty of material with the presidential race and the stock market faltering. So what kept me from spinning a delightful column?

Well...I'm hung up on this Metallica thing. Watching the Death Magnetic phenomenon unfurl has been even more compelling than watching my new hero, Paul Begala, tear John McCain a new one on CNN.

Follow this plotline, if you will:

1. First, a French record store doesn't get the memo that the album shouldn't be on the shelves until Friday, and they put it out on Tuesday. So before the big debut the Internet is already sagging from the weight of 9,000,000 MP3 versions of this thing zig-zagging back and forth.



2. The MP3's sound like shit, but everyone suspects this is the band being clever: flood the Internet with poor-quality MP3's to quash the black market, and then everyone will buy a nice, clear CD on Friday.



3. But Friday, everyone buys the CD, and reports: it sounds just as crappy as the MP3's! This was no clever marketing ploy, this album just sounds like a can of dump! But oddly enough, the poor sound is draped around the best album Metallica has made in a decade!



4. An e-mail allegedly from Ted Jensen, the very prominent mastering engineer who worked on Death Magnetic, hits the Metallica bulletin board, saying he's not proud to have his name associated with this CD, and swears what you hear is what Lars, Hetfield and Hammett wanted you to hear.
   
   Will we ever hear a good version of these songs?



5. Hark! It turns out the Guitar Hero version of this album, made available the same day, sounds 100x better than the CD! What someone needs to do is figure out how to rip this album from Guitar Hero!



6. And now, here come the multiple fan versions of Death Magnetic! Which to choose? The D34DL1N3R MP3's? The Covak FLAC's? The PaulIsMe FLAC's? Who's got the definitive version? The channels are switched between the Guitar Hero version and the CD, so which is right?

The irony of this is staggering: the very band that was on the cutting edge of railing against file sharing and MP3s are now dependent on those same technologies to give their fans a decent version of their newest album. It's not a big-name producer like Rick Rubin making the magic, nor a big-name mastering producer like Ted Jensen, or a world-class record label like Warner Brothers. No, average guys with Guitar Hero plugged into their PC's audio inputs with consumer-grade audio mastering programs are the ones saving the day, and cradling Metallica's fractured good name in their hands.