I was absent from here last week, had a minor injury that laid me up for a moment. All is well now and things should be routine from this point.

Also – this week I’m introducing a new aspect to this – I’ll grade each song as well as the album. Instead of reviewing by numbers I’ve chosen to use letter grades. This transition will take a little time to become a regular feature and I’ll do a quick post later this week to explain it more, but I decided to go with it starting today as I’ve been sitting on it for awhile now.

Today I’m going back to 1992 and looking at an album that saw Megadeth gain a great deal of mainstream success, though not quite as much as one member was hoping for.

Megadeth – Countdown To Extinction

Released July 14, 1992 via Capitol Records

Megadeth were hot off of their 1990 masterwork Rust In Peace, widely considered one of thrash metal’s finest hours. By 1992 the music scene was still reshuffling from the nuclear fallout of the summer of 1991 – while hair metal was the biggest casualty, thrash also suffered under the weight of grunge.

Thrash also suffered due to its biggest practitioner changing tack – concurrent with grunge was the arrival of Metallica’s “Black Album,” which abandoned the general structure of thrash and offered a more accessible version of heavy metal. Dave Mustaine’s former band saw the highest levels of success possible from this shift, and less than a year later a more accessible version of Megadeth was on offer.

The band accomplished something they had not managed before this point – they brought back every member from the prior album. Dave Mustaine would lead the band on guitars and vocals. Marty Friedman was the lead guitarist. Dave Ellefson provided bass and Nick Menza was the drummer. Songwriting was credited to Mustaine, with individual music and lyrics offered up by the other members and credited as such. The album was produced by Max Norman and Dave Mustaine.

This record features 11 songs at a time of 47:26. There are several re-issue versions available with a wealth of bonus material, today I’ll stick to the base album. Four songs were released as singles and were constant presences on MTV during the album cycle.

Skin o’ My Teeth

The opener shows that Megadeth didn’t sacrifice being heavy in the quest to be more accessible. This is a rolling, groovy beast of a song that quickly establishes itself as one of the album’s highlights. The song has its subject escape a number of near-death situations. It’s not entirely clear of this is a suicidal rampage or just bad luck and Mustaine has waffled on the answer to that over the years.

Whatever the case, this is one banger of a track and even while shifting direction, Megadeth kept their heaviness and guitar-focused attack in place. Grade: A+

Symphony Of Destruction

Up next is the album’s lead single and what has become Megadeth’s most widely recognized song. This one is super simple, with a riff that anyone can play and short, concise lyrics about how power corrupts and some world leaders send their people into chaos. It borders on being overly simple but still possesses the trademark Megadeth precision and Mustaine’s snarling delivery really enhances the track. Grade: A

Architecture Of Aggression

The song itself punches well but it also very straightforward, perhaps to its detriment. Its subject matter is that of the first Gulf War in 1991, and parts of CNN reporting on the first night of bombing are interspersed through the song. The song also offers the message that a nation’s leader is often credited for building their country, while the truth is that the country is often built upon the bones and blood of common people. Grade: B

Foreclosure Of A Dream

This one offers up a bit of thrash to it while also incorporating some acoustic runs alongside the more conventional electric passages. This one is concise but does offer up some movement to it, shaping up to be a more dynamic offering. The topic at hand is the end of the American Dream, as the 1980’s and early ’90’s saw erosion of the job base and farming sector of average US households. The dream was sold out for favorable deals with corporations, something that has only grown in scope 30 years later. This song does a great job of both delivering its message and making a heavy song accessible. Grade: A

Sweating Bullets

Up next is easily the most contentious song from this record. It does seem in some cases that whether or not someone likes the album hinges on what they think of this song.

It’s a song about insanity, Mustaine inserts several references to multiple personalities and schizophrenia here as well as overall metal health demise. Some of the song’s lines can be funny or cringe, depending on how someone takes them. While I wouldn’t suggest Dave Mustaine is mentally ill, he is clearly nuts so this probably wasn’t hard for him to write. The music is again suitably heavy and kept simple.

So what do I think? I personally love this song. Hell of a jam. Grade: A

This Was My Life

This is a song that keeps pretty strictly on the rails. Here Mustaine ruminates over the wreckage of an old affair he had and has apparently composed several songs about over the years. This song is fine but it does pale compared to a lot of the other stuff on this album. Just not nearly as much going on here. Grade: C+

Countdown To Extinction

Megadeth covered nuclear annihilation on their last album but here they take the title track and do something a bit different. The band focus on the extinction of species as well as the practice of “canned hunting,” where animals are kept in confined spaces and unscrupulous hunters pay big money to “hunt” them in close quarters. This is not Ted Nugent’s favorite song.

This tracks is very well done, a melodic and mid-paced tune with a socially conscious message very much in place with the atmosphere of the early ’90’s. Grade: A

High Speed Dirt

The pace kicks up a bit here as Megadeth offer up a song about skydiving, something they were very much into around this time and did on MTV’s Headbangers Ball in a memorable episode. There is a kicker, of course – the term “high speed dirt” means the diver is getting to the ground far faster than they’re supposed to, as in the parachute isn’t working. At some point there will be a splat. Grade: B+

Psychotron

This one is a plodder to a degree, another mid-paced marching riff kind of thing that Megadeth would use a lot over the next many years. The song is about the semi-obscure Marvel comics character Deathlok, a partial cyborg of some kind. The song is good though not really a standout. Grade: B-

Captive Honour

Up next is one very curious track. It is pretty well done musically, with the arrangement going a few different places and moving the song along more than the straightline approach on many others here. The subject matter is about the pretty awful conditions of US prisons, how some young punk who did something seriously wrong gets tossed into the can and becomes the “bitch of the block.”

The lyrical presentation here is a bit all over the place and does cast the song in a dimmer light for me. There’s rumination on the famous Stalin quote “one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic” and then there’s a whole skit between judge and convict that seems more goofy than anything. About the time the phrase “man-pussy” is used is when I kind of check out on this one, though again the music is really good and it’s a very mixed bag. Grade: C

Ashes In Your Mouth

The album’s closer is the longest song and also the biggest throwback to prior Megadeth albums. This is a blistering jam that recalls some of the more complex passages of Rust In Peace, though also keeps the verses slimmer in keeping with this album’s presentation. It’s a pretty brutal track about the human condition and the need to inflict violence on one another for perceived transgressions, all the while never being satisfied with the hollow victory of revenge. This is a total smokeshow of a song and a fantastic entry in the Megadeth catalog. Grade: A+

Countdown To Extinction would do what Mustaine set out to – generate a wider audience for Megadeth. The album debuted at number 2 on the Billboard chart and has been certified 2 times platinum, both career highs for Megadeth. It may have alienated some of the old school metalheads, but by 1992 that contingent was pretty much alienated from all sides. The pick-up of new fans more than made up for any disgruntled old fans.

Someone else who might have been disgruntled was Dave Mustaine. While Megadeth was seeing more success than ever, they still paled in comparison to Metallica, who were at stratospheric heights by this time. I do recall some derision over this album only getting to number 2, when Metallica’s opus hit the top spot. I don’t know totally how Mustaine felt about it all, trying to track his thoughts over the years would be utter madness. But barely anyone in music through that decade touched what Metallica did, there shouldn’t be any shame in how Megadeth fared in these years. Mustaine would chase the elusive “radio single” for awhile after this.

I always enjoyed Countdown To Extinction. I think it has a lot of great songs on it and even the songs that aren’t all that hot are pretty decent listens. The change to more lean songs didn’t bother me, I already had my mind well blown by the music shift of 1991 and I was game for anything by this point.

I was happy to see Megadeth get their due and with a quality album that still ran heavy and with a strain of socially aware topics.

Album Grade: A

Countdown To Extinction is a fantastic cut of metal from the “alt-metal” years of the 1990’s. Megadeth fashioned songs that could reach out to a wider audience but also held up credibly well against the rest of the now legendary Megadeth catalog. The album’s singles were memorable cuts, the lyrical commentary was often more sophisticated that what was found across other metal albums, and Mustaine and Friedman were still able to include a fair bit of guitar theatrics. Great work all around.