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The metal gods tossed their management team under the proverbial bus after those managers demanded takedowns of positive reviews by bloggers of some rough takes of Metallica's newest project.

Metal's legendary lineup found itself in the center of a tempest recently. Their management demanded the removal of reviews from blogs by writers who had been invited to a private listening session of some of the band's new works, in its early stages.

But wait! That wasn't Metallica making behind the scenes threats over the positive reviews its unfinished tracks received. Ho ho! It's management's fault, Metallica said on their site:

While we occasionally enjoy reading the various comments, rumors, speculation, reviews, gossip and all the good that the internet brings, rarely do we feel the desire/need to respond to the "blogosphere" . . . hey, everyone is entitled to have their thoughts and opinions, right?

However, once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites.

Our response was "WHY?!!! Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record. . . that makes no sense to us!"

Well, Lars, James, Kirk, and whoever isn't Cliff on bass these days, your managers, get this, work for you. If they felt a need to be hard-asses with some bloggers, knowing there would be pushback, we're pretty sure they were inclined to be that way because somehow that expectation was communicated to them.

So pretty please, with sugar on top, thanks for the apology, but the fans want something to cleanse the aural palette and awful memories of Load and Reload. Maybe if those rough tracks are as good as advertised, Metallica is on the right track.

Let's hope that includes their relationships with their fans writing for music blogs, too.