It would seem that Metallica’s press agency aren’t very with it. In an interesting set of articles on Wired have documented the farce of trying to suppress album views after having invited music journalists to a pre-release listening party.  If you invite a journalist to hear a new album, particularly from a group as big as Metallica they’re bound to write about it – it’s their job after all. But it would seem that the US agency assumed that they wouldn’t, and then tried to suppress the articles by demanding the magazines and blogs remove their reviews.

When the band heard about this they weren’t too happy, and have demanded that the situation be rectified, so now reviews are becoming available.

The overview article can be found at Pasture Of Muppets: Inside the Metallica Reviews Scandal | Listening Post from Wired.com and it has links to earlier items as the whole mess unrolled.