Countdown to Extinction

After releasing what I believe to be the best thrash metal album ever in 1990, “Rust in Peace”, Megadeth surely had a lot to live up to. Their mission was to craft a follow-up album that would bring the band to new heights. Of course, during the 1990s, thrash metal was experiencing a massive decrease in popularity. With this new decade, metal as a whole seemed to be changing. Most of the thrash bands that were exploding in the 1980s moved away from their roots. Sure, Slayer still mostly stuck to their formula, but Metallica adopted a simple, standard heavy metal/hard rock sound, Anthrax started incorporating influences of grunge and alternative metal, Testament started experimenting with death metal, and thanks mainly to bands like Pantera and Machine Head, groove metal basically overthrew thrash metal. This is not including the numerous grunge acts that began popping up. I’m not saying anything bad about these bands changing and new bands emerging, but thrash had all but died. Megadeth dropped much of the thrash out of their sound as well, beginning with this album, incorporating a more melodic heavy metal sound with slight traces of thrash still scattered about. “Countdown to Extinction” is Megadeth’s fifth full-length album and was released the year following Metallica’s self-titled album, otherwise known as “The Black Album”. Now, unlike that album, which would go on to sell 16 million+ copies in the U.S. alone, “Countdown to Extinction” is a solid heavy metal album from start to finish. The songwriting is far superior and the songs aren’t as boring or simplistic. Unfortunately, this album would only sell around 2 million copies in the U.S., which is significantly less than Metallica did. As if album sales were indicators of quality, anyway.

“Skin O’ My Teeth” shows an immediate shift in sound for Megadeth. Unlike the aggressive thrash riffs of old, this is more of a melodic rocker with an overall traditional heavy metal sound. The riffs are slower yet still fairly speed metal influenced, albeit less aggressive. The song that borrows the most from the band’s previous thrash sound would have to be the closer “Crown of Worms”. “Ashes In Your Mouth” is also fairly thrashy at times but really, the closing track is pretty much an all-out speed/thrash metal song. The rest of the album follows a more mid-paced heavy metal sound. Make no mistake, though, there is plenty of heaviness here. “Symphony of Destruction” has become one of the band’s most memorable songs, and rightfully so. After an extremely brief symphonic intro, a heavy riff explodes out of nowhere. This isn’t a very complex song, save for the solo, which every song seems to do a good job of providing, but damn that riff is crushing! Not only that, it’s positively catchy as well. “Sweating Bullets” is the album’s other song that achieved significant attention. Unfortunately, for me, this song falls a little short. It’s just not that great to my ears and is far too broken sounding. Really, this is probably the album’s weakest track. Thankfully it is followed by one of the album’s highlights, “This Was My Life”. This basically describes the album’s overall sound quite well. It’s extremely melodic and accessible but very much a Megadeth song. The album’s title-track is similar in formula, beginning with a melodic bass riff that explodes into a guitar riff and has one of the catchiest choruses on the album. The title-track also shows Mustaine writing about themes the band had never really touched on before this album.

Lyrically, this is a new stepping stone for the boys. The title-track, as I said, showed Mustaine’s lyrics moving in a different direction. This song deals with humanity and how humans are killing off different species of animals to extinction, basically. “Captive Honour” seems to deal with the state of prisons and what happens inside them. This song also starts with one of the most beautiful acoustic riffs Mustaine has ever written. I also must admit the “your soul better belong to Jesus, because your ass belongs to me” makes me giggle every time. “Psychotron” seems to be a little less on the serious side, which most of this album sticks to. It’s pretty much just a song about robots. One last song I will discuss here is “High Speed Dirt”. It becomes clear someone is going to die, judging by the “I’m off to meet my maker” remark. This song adopts lyrics alluding to someone heading towards the ground at full speed. Yes, this is a song about someone free-falling out of the sky on his way to certain death once he meets the ground as a “dirt torpedo”. So these lyrics range from really deep topics to thought-provoking themes, and themes of robots and falling from the sky. There is a lot of lyrical diversity here.

Armed with new lyrical ideas, Dave’s voice had been steadily improving through Megadeth’s career at this point. At the time this album was released, this was definitely Mustaine’s best vocal performance. I still wouldn’t say it’s mind-blowing or amazing because his vocals certainly aren’t the reason I generally listen to Megadeth, but they are much better here and more of a pleasure to listen to. They sometimes sound a little off, such as with “Sweating Bullets” to an extent, but they generally sound good.

Compared to Metallica’s self-titled record, where drummer Lars Ulrich probably only used two or three different drumlines throughout the entire album’s length, Nick Menza actually used a lot of drum variation on here for a more groove-oriented metal album. His technicality was not as highlighted as with “Rust in Peace”, obviously, but he was still able to shake things up here and even throw in a bit of the old speed metal influence in his playing, which is something Metallica totally failed to do throughout the 1990s. This reason, along with the still-present yet commercialized guitar technicality and precision, is the reason “Countdown to Extinction” is a FAR superior heavy metal album than “Metallica” was. Unfortunately, this album did not sell nearly as well and did not quite get the recognition it deserved. Really, this could be said about anything Megadeth had put out in the 1990s, which was all superior to 90s Metallica in every way. Oh well, Metallica is pretty much a "brand" within the metal genre, so of course it will sell better. That doesn't necessarily mean it IS better.

So with this album, Megadeth launched themselves into the world of 1990s commercial radio metal. But was it a failure? Was it a mistake? No, not at all. This album isn't up to the quality of most of what Megadeth has written prior, but really, comparing this to "Peace Sells" or "RIP" would be ridiculous because it's not in the same league. That being said, it is still a worthy album to bear the Megadeth logo and definitely outshines Metallica's self-titled album.