Back in 1987, one of my brother's friends gave him a copy of Metallica's "Master Of Puppets". I didn't bother trying to listen to it until a year later. I didn't hear any "real" Metal during most of the 1980s, or any Punk/Hardcore either. By the Summer of 1988, I think the heaviest bands I heard were Whitesnake and Van Halen. I'm not even talking the good old Van Halen either, I'm talking 1984/Van Hagar era! So needless to say, I wasn't really prepared for hearing Metallica. I had never heard a guitar tone like that, nor had I heard anything that was as fast or had as many tempo changes! It seemed so skull crushingly heavy at the time that my brother and I would listen to it for a bit, and then put it away for a couple of months. It was hard to believe that there were people that could listen to this stuff all the time!
Fast forward to Summer 1991: I finally start getting into Thrash Metal, buying Anthrax's "Persistence Of Time" and Suicidal Tendencies' "Controlled By Hatred/Feel Like Shit...Deja Vu." Most of the harder rock I had been listening to before just wasn't aggressive enough to help me deal with all the crap I had gone through during that previous year of school, so Thrash seemed like the next logical step up. Anyway, I remember hearing a song coming out of the upstairs bathroom at home one night (we had a boombox in there), and I was like, "What is that? It kind of sounds like Metallica, but then again it kind of doesn't." Then my brother came to tell me that a new Metallica song was on the radio. All I can say was that it was different. I wasn't 100% sure that I liked it. After hearing a few more songs, I still wasn't sure that I wanted to buy the album. During my freshman year of high school, a friend made a copy of it for me. It was on one side of a 90 minute tape, and it fit all but the last three tracks. He put a Thrash compilation called "Rising Metal" on the other side. Much like the opening track/first single, I didn't know whether I liked the Black Album or not either. It took me until 2007 to say, "Eh, what the hell, I'll buy it." And you know what? After all these years, I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about that album. I decided that it would be a good topic for a blog entry, but I kept putting it off because I wanted to sit down and listen to the whole thing. With this year being the 20th anniversary, I figured now would be the best time to do it.
Judging the songs: Only the first nine tracks of the album made it onto the tape that my friend made, and I've heard all of them on the radio at some point. I don't really have an opinion on a couple of the most overplayed songs, "Enter Sandman" and "Nothing Else Matters", because I've heard them so much that I fail to register any feelings either way when hearing them, except maybe "Oh god, this again?". Compared to "Nothing Else Matters", "The Unforgiven" was definitely the better ballad of the two. "Sad But True" and "Wherever I May Roam" still jam, "Sad But True" especially has a good crunch to it reminiscent of songs like "The Thing That Should Not Be" or "Harvester Of Sorrow". "Don't Tread On Me" has a good riff, but the lyrics seem like a jingoistic apology for the criticisms on "Master Of Puppets" and "...And Justice For All". (Update 6-8-2012: Lars admitted on That Metal Show that he recently listened to "Don't Tread On Me", and thought, "What were we thinking?") I really dig "Holier Than Thou" and "Through The Never", they're about the fastest that Metallica get here. Check out the live version of "Through The Never", it's a little faster than the LP version. "Of Wolf And Man" is okay, I probably would've liked it better had my dumb ass realized sooner that they were saying "Shape shift" and not "Shake Shake". As for the three less familiar-to-me tracks, "The God That Failed" and "The Struggle Within" are sorta badass, the latter being a decent album closer. "My Friend Of Misery" is okay.
Regarding the sound quality, the Black Album is arguably Metallica's overall best sounding album.The first three albums were fairly crappy sounding, and the bass guitar was virtually nonexistent on "...And Justice For All", using the guitars to fill out the bottom end. While I do enjoy the sheer crunch of "...Justice", I do feel kind of bad about Jason Newsted getting the shaft. The guitars were turned down on the Black Album, but you can hear the bass guitar, especially if you have woofers that are at least 6.5 inches. This was in the age before dynamic range compression got out of hand, and this also has the best dynamic range of Metallica's earlier albums.
The story goes that they wanted to do some leaner songs to play live after touring so long with the workouts that were the tracks from "...And Justice For All", and they liked the sound that Bob Rock achieved on Motley Crue's "Dr. Feelgood", so they hired him to produce. I actually believe this story, as opposed to the simple "They went Pop!" accusations that most fans would probably throw out. While it was a decent attempt at streamlining, Slayer did the "slowing down" thing better on "South Of Heaven" and "Seasons In The Abyss", and Pantera, without even trying, pretty much did what Metallica were attempting to do with the Black Album, essentially becoming the new Kings Of Metal to most of the American Metal audience while Metallica gained mainstream acceptance. I was needing something heavier at the time, and this album surely didn't do it for me. But when you get right down to it, I'd still rather listen to most of the Black Album before I'd listen to most of what passes for modern Metal. Despite "Death Magnetic"'s shitty sound quality, I still feel like DM is the album they should have made after "...Justice", then the transition to the "Black Album" style probably wouldn't have felt like such a shock.
One last thing: "Load" and "Reload" are the only Metallica studio albums I don't own, and I don't plan on owning them anytime in the near future. Most of the stuff I've heard from them, especially "Load", just seems like a bad mix of an even more watered down Black Album and too much '70s Hard Rock influence. "Reload" seems a little more inspired, like "Load" was the side of the band on "Garage Inc." that covered Bob Seger, while "Reload" was the side that covered Nick Cave. "St. Anger" was majorly flawed, possibly even crappy, but at least it was more metallic than the Loads.
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