By the time Dave Mustaine plugged in at Ocean Way Nashville on 23 October 2003, Megadeth had been a dead band for eighteen months. He had folded the operation publicly in April 2002 after a pinched nerve in his left arm left him unable to make a fist, let alone fret a guitar. The press release said a year of physical therapy and possibly a permanent retirement. The new album he was sketching out behind the scenes was supposed to be a solo record, with three hired guns, three studios, and his own name on the spine.
What forced the Megadeth logo back onto the artwork was not a creative epiphany. It was the publishing contract he had signed years earlier with his own company, which contractually required new material to be issued under the band name. The session players stayed. The producer he had not worked with since Cryptic Writings stayed. And, in the strangest twist of the project, the lead guitar parts on nine of the twelve tracks ended up being played by Chris Poland, who had not appeared on a Megadeth album since Peace Sells in 1986. The System Has Failed is the sound of a comeback that was never supposed to be a comeback at all.
Album facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Megadeth |
| Album | The System Has Failed |
| Release date | 14 September 2004 |
| Label | Sanctuary Records |
| Producer(s) | Dave Mustaine and Jeff Balding (co-produced and recorded) |
| Studio(s) | Ocean Way Nashville and Emerald Entertainment (Nashville, Tennessee); Phase Four Studios (Tempe, Arizona) |
| Recording dates | 23 October 2003 to 9 April 2004 |
| Genre / Subgenre | Heavy metal, thrash metal |
| Track count | 12 |
| Total runtime | 48:24 |
| Billboard 200 peak | No. 18 (debut), 46,000 first-week sales |
| UK Albums Chart peak | No. 60; No. 14 on the UK Rock & Metal Albums chart; No. 8 on UK Independent Albums |
| Other notable chart peaks | No. 10 Canada, No. 12 Finland, No. 14 Sweden, No. 15 Japan, No. 29 Germany |
| Certifications | None known |
| Estimated sales | 196,000 US by December 2007; a further 200,000 US by October 2019 |
| Key singles | "Die Dead Enough", "Of Mice and Men", "The Scorpion" |
Cultural context: thrash in 2004
The week The System Has Failed arrived in shops, the American album chart was dominated by Maroon 5, Ashlee Simpson and Hoobastank. Green Day's American Idiot would land two weeks later. Metallica's St. Anger was a fourteen-month-old wound still being argued about in fan forums. Slayer were touring God Hates Us All while writing Christ Illusion. Anthrax were between Bush and Bello on bass. The Big Four of thrash were either commercially adrift, internally fractured, or both.
Around them, a generation of younger bands had filled the room. Lamb of God's Ashes of the Wake had come out three weeks before Megadeth's record and would go gold inside a year. Mastodon's Leviathan had landed the same month. Trivium's Ascendancy was being mastered. The metal conversation in 2004 was about the new American wave, not the surviving members of the old one. Megadeth's place in that conversation was, charitably, a footnote.
This was the landscape Mustaine walked into with a record that almost no Megadeth fan had been expecting. The previous studio album, 2001's The World Needs a Hero, had been received as a stiff course-correction after the experimental commercial drift of Risk. By 2002 the band was simply gone. Two and a half years later, with a different label, a different producer, no original bandmates and no warning beyond a few Blabbermouth news items, a new Megadeth record turned up.
The band's story up to this point
Megadeth was Dave Mustaine's response to being fired from Metallica in April 1983. The band had spent the eighties writing the thrash rulebook with Peace Sells... but Who's Buying?, the nineties dragging that rulebook into platinum territory with Rust in Peace and Countdown to Extinction, and the late nineties trying to escape its own shadow with Cryptic Writings and Risk. By 2001, Mustaine had reduced the lineup down to himself, David Ellefson, Jimmy DeGrasso and Al Pitrelli, and recorded The World Needs a Hero as a deliberate course back toward heavier territory.
The end came in stages. In January 2002 the band finished a long tour. Mustaine fell asleep in a chair in a Texas hotel room with his left arm across the back of it, hand dangling, and woke up with what doctors eventually diagnosed as radial neuropathy, a nerve compression injury that had paralysed the muscles in his fingers and forearm. His left hand could not close. He could not play guitar. He could not even hold a pen.
On 3 April 2002 he formally announced that Megadeth was disbanding. He spent the next eighteen months in daily physical therapy. By the time he was demoing songs again in late 2003, function in the hand had returned. Speed and accuracy had not. The records he made in the years immediately after, including The System Has Failed, were tracked by a guitarist who was learning to play his own catalogue again.
Pre-production and demos
The earliest material on the album dates from immediately after the band's collapse. Mustaine has said in his Megadeth.com Scorpion column that "Tears in a Vial" was written shortly after Megadeth disbanded in 2002, and that it was about deciding to trade success for happiness. Other tracks were sketched as he came back to the instrument.
"Die Dead Enough" arrived as a commission. The producers of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life approached Mustaine in 2003 to write a song for the film. The recording budget they put forward was, in Mustaine's words to interviewer Robert Pally, too low to make the deal work, and the song went unrecorded for the soundtrack. Later, when The System Has Failed was already in progress, the same track was earmarked for the first Saw film, only for that placement to fall through as well. The song that ended up opening the album's promotional campaign had already been twice rejected by the screen industry.
Mustaine's working pattern through pre-production was unusually relaxed. In a 2004 Sanctuary Records promotional statement he described the early sessions as "liberating", saying he had more control over this record than he had had since Megadeth's first two albums, and that he initially worked three hours a night, four days a week. That schedule changed once the project was upgraded from solo album to Megadeth album, and the budget and deadline came with it.
Creating the album: Nashville, Tempe, October 2003 to April 2004
The record was tracked across two cities and three studios. The bulk of the work happened at Ocean Way Nashville and Emerald Entertainment in Nashville, Tennessee. Additional sessions were done at Phase Four Studios in Tempe, Arizona, near Mustaine's home. The first session was logged on 23 October 2003. The last on 9 April 2004.
Jeff Balding co-produced, recorded and mixed. Balding had engineered Cryptic Writings in 1997 and Risk in 1999 and was effectively the only Megadeth-related collaborator Mustaine kept from the previous decade. The recording team around him was a deep Nashville crew of assistants, additional engineers and digital editors, including David Bryant, Ralph Patlan, Scott Kidd, Jesse Amend, Lance Dean and Jed Hackett. Adam Ayan mastered the record.
The defining decision of the sessions was who played the music. With Megadeth officially over, Mustaine hired session players rather than restart the band. Vinnie Colaiuta, the session and fusion drummer best known for his work with Sting, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell, played all the drums. Jimmie Lee Sloas, a Nashville session bassist with credits across country and pop, played bass. Mustaine, despite having recovered from the nerve injury, was not back to playing all his own leads at speed, so he reached out to Chris Poland, his lead guitarist on Killing Is My Business and Peace Sells, who had been out of the Megadeth orbit for eighteen years. Poland played lead guitar on every track except "I Know Jack", "Truth Be Told" and "The Scorpion".
"It was very liberating. I had more control over the record than I'd had since the first two Megadeth records. I initially took a casual approach to the album, starting out working three hours a night, four days a week."
Dave Mustaine, Sanctuary Records promotional statement, July 2004
Mustaine has been candid in later interviews about how strange the arrangement felt at the time. Speaking to Blabbermouth in March 2007 about the record's origins, he insisted, "Anyone who says that Megadeth isn't me is a fool." That line is sometimes read as bravado. In context, it is more like an admission. The System Has Failed is the first album in his career where the only continuous Megadeth element on the recording is Mustaine himself.
He had tried, briefly, to make it otherwise. When the decision came to rebrand the record from solo project to Megadeth album, Mustaine contacted David Ellefson about returning to bass. The talks went nowhere. Ellefson told Blabbermouth in October 2004 that Mustaine was not financially willing to "pick up where it was when the band broke up". The two would not work together again until the 2010 reunion.
The session-player approach paid off in performance terms. Colaiuta's playing on "Blackmail the Universe" and "Kick the Chair" sits closer to a jazz drummer's command of dynamics than to Nick Menza's or Jimmy DeGrasso's previous Megadeth work. Sloas's bass is warm, dry, and almost entirely absent of the lead-bass flourishes Ellefson had built his Megadeth identity on. Poland's lead playing, distinct in tone and phrasing from anything on the band's nineties records, is the audible thread that links the album back to Peace Sells.
Personnel and credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Megadeth (album lineup) | ||
| Lead vocals, lead and rhythm guitar | Dave Mustaine | First studio album after recovering from 2002 radial neuropathy injury |
| Lead guitar (9 of 12 tracks) | Chris Poland | Returning Megadeth alumnus; first appearance on a Megadeth record since Peace Sells in 1986 |
| Bass | Jimmie Lee Sloas | Nashville session player; not a band member |
| Drums | Vinnie Colaiuta | Session player known for Sting, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell; not a band member |
| Session musicians and contributors | ||
| Backing vocals | Chris Rodriguez | On tracks 1 to 5, 7 to 10, 12 |
| Additional vocals | Ralph Patlan, Robert Venable, Lance Dean, Scott Harrison | On various tracks including 2, 7 and 9 |
| Voice of the Reporter | Celeste Amber Montague | Intro of "Blackmail the Universe" |
| Voice of the General | Darien Bennett | "Blackmail the Universe" |
| Voice of the Politician | Ralph Patlan | "Blackmail the Universe" |
| Keyboards | Tim Akers, Charlie Judge | Tim Akers on tracks 1, 7 to 12; Judge on 2, 4 and 5 |
| Percussion | Eric Darken | On tracks 1, 2, 5, 7, 9 and 10 |
| Strings and banjo | Jonathan Yudkin | Strings on 4, 5 and 9; banjo on "Something That I'm Not" |
| Sound effects | Michael Davis | On tracks 1, 4 and 11 |
| Spoken background | Justis Mustaine | Dave Mustaine's son, on "Something That I'm Not" |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Production, recording | Dave Mustaine and Jeff Balding | Co-produced; Balding had engineered Cryptic Writings and Risk |
| Mixing | Jeff Balding | Mixed at Nashville |
| Recording assistance | David Bryant, Ralph Patlan, Scott Kidd, Jesse Amend, Lance Dean, Jed Hackett | |
| Additional recording | David Bryant, Jed Hackett, John Saylor | |
| Mastering | Adam Ayan | |
| Digital editing | Mark Hagen, Jed Hackett | |
| Production coordination | Mike "Frog" Griffith | |
| Artwork and design | ||
| Cover art | Mike Learn | Based on a concept by Dave Mustaine |
| Design | t42design | Sleeve and layout |
| Touring lineup (post-album, late 2004) | ||
| Drums (tour) | Nick Menza, then Shawn Drover | Menza rehired in July 2004 then sent home five days before the tour began; replaced by Shawn Drover |
| Bass (tour) | James MacDonough | Left Iced Earth in September 2004 to join Megadeth's touring band |
| Lead guitar (tour) | Glen Drover | Joined in September 2004 after Annihilator's Jeff Waters had been in talks for the role |
The personnel section above tells the central story of the record on its own. The four-person Megadeth lineup credited on the sleeve never played a live show together in that exact configuration. Two of them were Nashville session players hired for a fee. One had been out of the band for eighteen years. Only one, Mustaine, would still be in Megadeth eighteen months later. The lineup that toured the album was a third, entirely separate ensemble assembled from scratch in July and September 2004.
The songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blackmail the Universe | Mustaine | 4:33 | Promo | Opens with a Reporter / General / Politician dialogue voiced by three different session vocalists |
| 2 | Die Dead Enough | Mustaine | 4:18 | Yes (lead) | Originally written for Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life; later considered for Saw; ended up on Mainstream Rock #21 |
| 3 | Kick the Chair | Mustaine | 3:57 | Free download | Released as a free promo download via Megadeth.com in May 2004; the album mix is a re-mix of the version originally released |
| 4 | The Scorpion | Mustaine | 5:59 | Yes (2005) | Longest track on the album; one of three songs Poland does not play lead on |
| 5 | Tears in a Vial | Mustaine | 5:21 | No | Written by Mustaine shortly after Megadeth disbanded in 2002, about trading success for happiness |
| 6 | I Know Jack | Mustaine | 0:40 | No | Instrumental featuring a sample of Senator Lloyd Bentsen's "you're no Jack Kennedy" line to Dan Quayle from the 1988 vice-presidential debate |
| 7 | Back in the Day | Mustaine | 3:27 | No (video 2014) | A nostalgic, mid-tempo rock song; later soundtracked a 2005 Duck Dodgers episode and got an animated music video |
| 8 | Something That I'm Not | Mustaine | 5:07 | No | Features banjo by Jonathan Yudkin and a spoken background part by Mustaine's son Justis |
| 9 | Truth Be Told | Mustaine | 5:40 | No | One of three songs Poland does not play lead on; Mustaine handles all guitars |
| 10 | Of Mice and Men | Mustaine | 4:04 | Yes | Second single; reached Mainstream Rock #39; video filmed in Los Angeles on 20 January 2005 with fan extras chosen by Sanctuary contest |
| 11 | Shadow of Deth | Mustaine (Psalm 23 credited to David) | 2:15 | No | Mustaine recites Psalm 23, opening with the Latin phrase "Auxilium meum a Domino" ("My help comes from the Lord") |
| 12 | My Kingdom | Mustaine | 3:03 | No | Closes the album; Poland on lead |
Every song on the record is credited to Mustaine alone. That is unusual in the Megadeth catalogue: the band's nineties albums had pulled writing credits from Marty Friedman, Nick Menza, and David Ellefson regularly. The all-Mustaine credit on The System Has Failed is the clearest evidence that this is the solo album that became a band record.
"Blackmail the Universe" sets the political register that the entire record runs on. The opening is a fake news bulletin: a reporter, a general, and a politician trading scripted lines about a coming war, voiced by three different session vocalists. The riff that follows is the closest the album gets to old-school Megadeth gallop. It is also the song the eventual touring band would name their North American leg after.
"Die Dead Enough" was the lead single, the radio hook, and the song two films had already passed on. As a mid-tempo melodic metal track it has more in common with Cryptic Writings-era Megadeth than with anything from Rust in Peace, and it reached number 21 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart in 2004. The official video below was directed by Thomas Mignone and premiered on MTV's Headbanger's Ball in September 2004.
"Kick the Chair" had been released as a free download from Megadeth.com in May 2004, several months ahead of the album. Mustaine described the freebie version on Blabbermouth at the time as a final mix, but it was not the mix that appeared on the record. The released album version is a separate pass mixed later in the project.
"The Scorpion" is the album's longest piece and one of three tracks where Mustaine plays all the guitar parts himself, without Poland. It is also the song Mustaine chose to push as the album's third single in May 2005, after Sanctuary's commercial run on "Of Mice and Men" had wound down.
"I Know Jack" is the album's outlier and its most obviously political joke. At forty seconds long, it is an instrumental built around a sample of Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen's famous put-down of Dan Quayle from the 1988 US vice-presidential debate: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." It is the only song on the record without a Poland lead, because there are essentially no leads to play.
"Back in the Day" is the strangest hit in the back catalogue. A mid-tempo, nostalgic mainstream-rock song about the bands Mustaine grew up listening to, it was not released as a single in 2004. Instead it ended up soundtracking an episode of Warner Bros. animated series Duck Dodgers, titled "In Space, No One Can Hear You Rock", which aired on 4 November 2005 and featured an animated version of Megadeth performing the song. A music video for "Back in the Day" was actually shot in 2005 but sat unreleased until 15 September 2014, when Megadeth put it out to mark the album's tenth anniversary.
"Shadow of Deth" closes the album's narrative arc with Mustaine reciting Psalm 23 over a slow doom riff, opening in Latin: "Auxilium meum a Domino," which translates as "My help comes from the Lord." His public Christian conversion had been quietly announced a few years earlier, and the track was the first time he had folded direct scripture into a Megadeth song.
B-sides and bonus tracks
Different territorial editions of The System Has Failed shipped with different bonus material, which has confused fans and Discogs editors ever since:
- The Japanese edition added the "Die Dead Enough" music video as track 13, bringing the runtime to 52:55.
- A separate bonus configuration added two live tracks, "Time / Use the Man" (6:30) and "The Conjuring" (5:26), bringing the runtime to 60:20.
- The 2019 reissue, released on CD, vinyl and digital on 15 February 2019, restored the album to its original 12-track running order in a remastered form.
There are no widely-circulated outtakes from the sessions. Mustaine's writing pattern was tight enough that the twelve tracks recorded are essentially the twelve tracks released, with the only noteworthy variant being the earlier "Kick the Chair" promo mix.
Album artwork and packaging
The cover is the most politically explicit Megadeth sleeve since the band's "Holy Wars" era. Illustrator Mike Learn was commissioned in July 2004, working from a concept by Mustaine. The final painting shows Megadeth mascot Vic Rattlehead, drawn here as a corrupt lawyer in robes, selling a not-guilty verdict to then US President George W. Bush on the steps of the United States Supreme Court building.
The cast in the background is the entire 2004 administration plus the opposition. Hillary Clinton stands saluting next to former President Bill Clinton. Vice President Dick Cheney holds a briefcase labelled "Plan B", a visual gag on the nuclear football. Behind Cheney are National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft. The $100 bills changing hands on the courthouse steps are detailed enough that Vic Rattlehead's face replaces Benjamin Franklin's on each one.
It is a partisan image. Mustaine has said in interviews since that it was as much a comment on the political system as on any individual figure, but the iconography is unambiguous. In a metal scene that, in 2004, had largely retreated from explicit political art after the post-9/11 censorship climate, the sleeve was a deliberate provocation. Metal Forces reviewer Neil Arnold singled it out for praise, comparing it to the 1980s political artwork the genre had largely abandoned.
Release and reception
The album was streamed in full on VH1.com three days ahead of release. It hit shops on 14 September 2004 and debuted at number 18 on the Billboard 200, with 46,000 first-week sales, the highest first-week chart placement for any Megadeth album to that point on Sanctuary. Internationally, it cracked the top ten in Canada at number 10, the top twenty in Finland (12), Sweden (14) and Japan (15), and reached number 29 in Germany. In the UK it stalled at 60 on the main albums chart but reached number 14 on the Rock & Metal Albums chart and number 8 on UK Independent Albums.
By December 2007, Blabbermouth's tracking had US sales at 196,000. A further 200,000 had been added by October 2019, taking the total close to 400,000 in the United States alone. That is roughly twice what The World Needs a Hero had managed and was, by Sanctuary's standards, a substantial success for a record that started life as a solo project.
Reviews were largely positive and, in several cases, framed the record as a comeback:
- AllMusic's Jason Birchmeier gave it four stars and wrote that Megadeth had not "sounded this vital since Countdown to Extinction", calling the album "damn near perfect".
- Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles' Martin Popoff scored it 9 out of 10, calling it a mix of several previous Megadeth records but flagging the all-session-musician lineup as the album's one weakness.
- Blistering's David E. Gehlke gave it 8 out of 10, saying Mustaine's vocals were "as strong as ever" but the album lacked "thrash burners".
- Metal Forces' Neil Arnold (8 out of 10) credited the album with putting Megadeth "back on track" and praised the artwork.
- Germany's Rock Hard awarded 8.5 out of 10.
- Entertainment Weekly's Nancy Miller called it Megadeth's best since 1990's Rust in Peace, singling out the Mustaine-Poland collaboration as "righteous".
- The dissenting voices were Drowned in Sound's Nick Lancaster, who scored it 4 out of 10 and called it "a severe case of St. Anger syndrome", and musicOMH's Tom Day, who praised "Die Dead Enough" but felt that by "Shadow of Deth" Mustaine had "run out of ideas".
"Megadeth hasn't sounded this vital since Countdown to Extinction. The System Has Failed is damn near perfect."
Jason Birchmeier, AllMusic, 2004
Singles and music videos
Sanctuary worked three singles from the record across 2004 and 2005, although none of them broke into the upper reaches of the rock charts:
- "Die Dead Enough" – released 26 June 2004 as the lead single. Music video directed by Thomas Mignone, premiered on MTV's Headbanger's Ball in September 2004. Reached number 21 on the US Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
- "Of Mice and Men" – released in late 2004 as the second single. Reached number 39 on Mainstream Rock Tracks. The music video showed the new touring Megadeth lineup performing live and was largely filmed in Los Angeles on 20 January 2005 with fans cast as extras via a Sanctuary Records contest.
- "The Scorpion" – released on 10 May 2005 as the third single. No accompanying music video.
- "Blackmail the Universe" – issued as a promotional single only.
- "Back in the Day" – a music video was filmed in 2005 but remained unreleased until 15 September 2014, when Megadeth put it out to celebrate the album's tenth anniversary.
Touring and live
Mustaine still had a problem. He had a Megadeth album to promote and no Megadeth to play it. Across July and September 2004, a new touring lineup was assembled.
Drummer Nick Menza, who had been in the band from Rust in Peace through Cryptic Writings, was rehired in early July 2004. Bassist James MacDonough left Iced Earth in September to join. Guitarist Glen Drover came in around the same time, after Annihilator's Jeff Waters had been seriously discussed for the role before talks broke down. Five days before the tour began, however, Mustaine sent Menza home, saying publicly that he was not prepared to tour with the band. Glen Drover's brother Shawn Drover was hired to replace him almost overnight. By the time the tour started, the touring band had three brand-new members and a fourth who had been a brand-new member five days earlier.
The Blackmail the Universe Tour launched on 23 October 2004 in Reno, Nevada, with American post-grunge band Earshot in support. The setlist leaned heavily on Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction and Peace Sells, with three or four new tracks rotated in nightly. Reviews of the early dates focused on Glen Drover's note-perfect renditions of Marty Friedman's parts and on Mustaine's visibly slower right hand. The tour ran across North America through the autumn and rolled into Europe and Asia through 2005.
Chris Poland, the man who had played most of the lead guitar on the record, did not tour. He was a session contributor only, and returned to his band OHM after the sessions ended.
In TV, film and media
The album's most unexpected media placement is "Back in the Day", which soundtracked the Duck Dodgers animated television episode "In Space, No One Can Hear You Rock" on 4 November 2005, after a one-week broadcast delay. The episode featured an animated version of the entire touring Megadeth lineup performing the song in space, with Mustaine providing voice work for his cartoon counterpart. It is the only time a Megadeth song has been folded into a Looney Tunes universe production.
"Die Dead Enough" failed to land in either of the films it had been written for. It was Mustaine's pitch for the second Tomb Raider film, where the recording budget killed the deal, and was at one point announced for the soundtrack to the original 2004 Saw. The Saw producers ultimately declined to use it.
Controversy and the political cover
The cover drew predictable responses in the United States in 2004, an election year. Right-leaning American radio stations declined to display the artwork in store-front promotions. Sanctuary did not commission an alternate sleeve. Mustaine, whose politics had shifted substantially across the previous decade and would continue to shift, defended the image as a commentary on systemic political corruption rather than a partisan attack, although the visual evidence pulled in both directions.
"Shadow of Deth" also drew quiet controversy among long-time Megadeth listeners. The Psalm 23 recitation was an early public marker of Mustaine's Christianity in his songwriting, in a band whose name and earlier material had been read as anything but devotional. Some longer-term fans interpreted the track as evidence of a more pronounced theological turn that would surface explicitly on United Abominations in 2007 and Endgame in 2009.
Covers, samples and tributes
The System Has Failed has been less covered than Megadeth's eighties records, but its songs have travelled in specific corners:
- "Die Dead Enough" has appeared on multiple Megadeth tribute and karaoke records issued since 2010.
- "Kick the Chair" has surfaced regularly in live cover sets by mid-tier US thrash and groove metal bands, particularly during the 2005 to 2010 tour circuit.
- "Back in the Day" has been covered on Mustaine-tribute streams and was performed live in modified form by the touring Megadeth band as late as the 2010s.
- The Lloyd Bentsen "Jack Kennedy" sample on "I Know Jack" is itself a famous piece of US political audio that has been re-used and parodied across decades; the Megadeth instrumental is one of the few uses of it in a heavy-metal context.
Reissues, remasters and anniversaries
The album's reissue history is short but worth noting:
- 15 September 2014: Megadeth released the long-shelved "Back in the Day" music video to mark the album's tenth anniversary.
- 15 February 2019: A remastered version of The System Has Failed was reissued alongside a remastered The World Needs a Hero on CD, vinyl and digital download. Both records had been part of Megadeth's Sanctuary Records period, and the two-album reissue served as the first time the original 12-track running order had been restored on a wide-release physical format since the original 2004 pressing.
The album has not yet received a super-deluxe box treatment with demos and alternate mixes of the sort Rust in Peace and Countdown to Extinction have had. The session-player nature of the original recordings, the lack of a touring document of the album's promotional cycle, and Megadeth's preference for celebrating its eighties peak in deluxe form, have all kept The System Has Failed in standard reissue territory.
Legacy and influence
Two decades on, The System Has Failed sits in an unusual spot in the Megadeth discography. It is the album that brought the band back from a stated retirement, the album that re-established Mustaine as a credible thrash voice in a post-thrash decade, and the album that paved the way for the longer creative re-engagement of United Abominations (2007), Endgame (2009) and the 2010 Ellefson reunion. Without the commercial debut at number 18 in 2004, the next decade of the band's career is hard to imagine.
It is also a strange record on its own terms. The session-musician lineup means it cannot easily be slotted into the "classic Megadeth" canon. The Chris Poland reunion never extended beyond these recordings. The political cover and Psalm-reciting closer pull in opposite ideological directions. The album does not have a Megadeth fan-base consensus the way Rust in Peace, Countdown to Extinction or even Endgame have.
What it does have is the most genuine "Mustaine alone" portrait in the catalogue. Every song is written by him. Every guitar part is either played or directed by him. The cover concept is his. The lineup decisions and the songwriting choices all run through one person. The record that he originally conceived as his first solo album is, in the end, the one Megadeth album where his ownership is total.
"Anyone who says that Megadeth isn't me is a fool."
Dave Mustaine, Blabbermouth.net, March 2007
That is also why The System Has Failed has aged better than its 2004 reception promised. Once the comeback narrative had faded, the album stood revealed as exactly what it had been from the beginning: a solo record with a Megadeth logo on it, made by a guitarist who was relearning how to be himself.
Things you might not know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Solo album in disguise | The System Has Failed was originally intended as a Dave Mustaine solo album; contractual obligations to his own publishing company forced him to release it under the Megadeth name instead. |
| The arm injury | Mustaine had disbanded Megadeth in April 2002 after falling asleep with his arm across a chair-back caused radial neuropathy, paralysing the muscles in his left hand and forearm for over a year. |
| Chris Poland's return | Lead guitarist Chris Poland had not played on a Megadeth studio album since Peace Sells... but Who's Buying? in 1986; eighteen years later he plays lead on nine of the twelve tracks here. |
| Three session studios, two cities | Recording took place across Ocean Way Nashville and Emerald Entertainment in Nashville, Tennessee, and Phase Four Studios in Tempe, Arizona, between 23 October 2003 and 9 April 2004. |
| The Ellefson talks | Mustaine contacted David Ellefson about rejoining for the album, but Ellefson later said Mustaine was not financially willing to "pick up where it was when the band broke up". |
| A jazz drummer made the kick patterns | The drums were played by Vinnie Colaiuta, a session and fusion specialist whose previous credits included Sting, Frank Zappa and Joni Mitchell rather than any thrash metal records. |
| "Die Dead Enough" was a film cast-off twice | The lead single had been pitched for Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, with the deal falling through over budget, and was then briefly announced for the Saw soundtrack before the producers declined to use it. |
| A free download before the album dropped | "Kick the Chair" was released as a free download from Megadeth.com in May 2004; the version that appeared on the album was a different mix. |
| Nick Menza fired five days before the tour | Mustaine rehired Menza on drums in July 2004 then sent him home five days before the Blackmail the Universe Tour began; Shawn Drover was hired in his place almost overnight. |
| Mustaine's son on the album | Justis Mustaine contributes a background spoken part to "Something That I'm Not", which also features Nashville session ace Jonathan Yudkin on banjo. |
| A 1988 political put-down as a track | The 40-second instrumental "I Know Jack" is built around a sample of Senator Lloyd Bentsen telling Senator Dan Quayle "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" during the 1988 US vice-presidential debate. |
| Latin from the King James Bible | "Shadow of Deth" is Mustaine reciting Psalm 23, opening with the Latin phrase "Auxilium meum a Domino" – "My help comes from the Lord." |
| An animated Megadeth cameo | "Back in the Day" soundtracked the Duck Dodgers episode "In Space, No One Can Hear You Rock" in November 2005, with an animated Megadeth lineup performing the song. |
| A music video that waited a decade | The "Back in the Day" music video was filmed in 2005 but sat unreleased until 15 September 2014, when Megadeth put it out to mark the album's tenth anniversary. |
| Highest debut on Sanctuary | The album debuted at number 18 on the Billboard 200 with 46,000 first-week sales, the highest first-week placement Megadeth had achieved on Sanctuary Records. |
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