Super Collider

Super Collider is the fourteenth studio album by American heavy metal band Megadeth. It was released on June 4, 2013 and is Megadeth's first album to be released on Mustaine's own label, Tradecraft, after the band's split with Roadrunner Records. Two versions of the album are available domestically, a standard edition, and a Best Buy-exclusive edition which features three additional tracks. The album has been met with a largely negative reception by critics. However, it debuted at number six on the Billboard 200, making Super Collider the band's highest charting album since 1994's Youthanasia.

Super Collider is the first Megadeth album since Cryptic Writings (1997), not to feature a lineup change from the preceding album. Additionally, it is the first album by the band to feature a cover song as part of its base tracklist since So Far, So Good... So What! (1988). The album also features a guest appearance from Disturbed and Device vocalist David Draiman. (wiki)

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by James Christopher Monger

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. Also, why is there a painting of Iron Man on the back cover? Things certainly don’t improve with the limp "Burn!," an artless slab of gym metal that finds the normally erudite Dave Mustaine rhyming fire with desire, a desire that "burns hotter than hell." In fact, outside of "Kingmaker," the banjo-led Rob Zombie-meets-Mark Lanegan lament "Blackest Crow" and the outstanding "Built for War," a surprisingly agile, apocalyptic anti-anthem which was co-written with drummer Shawn Drover and guitarist Chris Broderick, the latter of whom supplies the cut with some truly impressive riffage, Super Collider is so mired in midtempo drudgery and familiar hard rock (not thrash) tropes that it never really connects.