Metallica

The group, formed in Los Angeles, took to the extreme the intuitions of thirty years of violent rock. At the very moment when heavy metal was becoming one of the most commercially successful genres and a staple of MTV, Metallica led the opposition, restoring to the genre its anti-establishment aura, in terms mediated by the most hardcore punk rock. It was the tape No Life 'Til Leather (1982) that made them a cult phenomenon among headbangers of the Hollywood Strip, thanks to the wild energy of “Jump In The Fire” and “Seek And Destroy.” A few months before the release of their first album, Hammett (formerly of Exodus) replaced original guitarist Dave Mustaine (who in the meantime went on to form Megadeth).

The album Kill ’Em All (Megaforce, 1983 – Elektra, 1987) made history with its dark, desperate sound and the sharp tone of the guitars leading the sonic assault. “Hit The Lights” set the standard: epileptic drumming, obsessive vocal fury, vertiginous solos that exaggerated rock and roll, and continuous abrasive bursts of bass and guitar. The anthem “Four Horsemen” has more solemn accents: the rhythm slows, the chorus soars into a true melody, while the guitars animate the narrative with constant theme changes and increasingly sparkling solos. The machine-gun fire of “Whiplash” brings back the incendiary climate of “Hit The Lights,” but rendered even more violent and essential. The wild quadrille of “Phantom Lord” keeps the tension high while the singing rants in a gothic, psychotic tone. “No Remorse” slows to a mighty panzer-like cadence, but the singer continues his lofty preaching. The guitars rage uncontrollably. “Metal Militia” delivers the final blow with another electrifying guitar shock. “Motorbreath” (driven at a charging pace and closed by a supersonic solo) and the frenzied “Seek & Destroy” (a limping Hendrix-like riff coagulating into obsessive staccato) also demonstrate the group’s technical skill. “Pulling Teeth,” opened by two minutes of melodic bass distortion from Cliff Burton, launches into galactic distortions over an insistent rock and roll drumbeat. These majestic tracks, built on Cliff Burton’s martial bass rumble, Ulrich’s frantic hammering, and shrill Richie Blackmore-like guitar blasts alternating with irresistible charging passages, gave birth to the entire movement.

In 1983, Metallica moved to El Cerrito, in the Bay Area.

More controlled and deliberate, Ride The Lightning (Megaforce, 1984) was musically more varied and mature, rich on one hand with Hammett’s usual breathtaking gallops (“Fight Fire” is perhaps his masterpiece), and on the other with more conventional horrific ballads (the melodic “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” the acoustic “Fade To Black”), with vertiginous slam-dance tracks (“Trapped Under Ice”) and long sarabandes of deafening chaos (the nine-minute instrumental “Ktulu”). Reacting against the vulgar, bourgeois theatrics of glam metal dominating the Los Angeles scene, Metallica fused melodic metal with the speed, drive, and apocalyptic lyrics of thrash punk. Three decades of hard riff science, from “Rumble” to “You Really Got Me,” are sublimated in Hammett and Ulrich’s furious raids.

The album Master Of Puppets (Elektra, 1986), despite systematic media boycotts, became a best-seller, thanks to more meaningful lyrics, a more complex song structure (three tracks exceed eight minutes), and (for them) almost baroque arrangements, as much in the epileptic anthems like “Battery” as in the tank-like blasts of “Leper Messiah” and “Thing That Should Not Be,” as much in the melodic ballad “Welcome Home” as in the incandescent bacchanal of “Disposable Heroes.” The absolute protagonist is the guitar, the true “voice” of the sound. Hetfield challenges Page’s memory in the romantic glissandi of “Master Of Puppets” and buries Van Halen with a series of incendiary acrobatics slipped in everywhere like acts of guerrilla terrorism, even if he then plays around in the new instrumental showpiece “Orion.”

And Justice For All (Elektra, 1988), with a new bassist replacing Burton (killed in a 1986 road accident), enshrined their creative “art-metal” in the Olympus of heavy metal—a style that ignored the genre’s commercial rules and instead indulged in complex architectures of free-form style. However, the album itself exceeds in emphasis and gruesomeness (the title track, “Frayed Ends of Sanity”), in theatricality and melodrama (“One,” practically a remake of “Fade To Black”), and in “narrative” devices (hiccupping riffs, martial rhythms) repeated ad nauseam, recovering pathos and epic spirit only in the instrumental of the moment, “To Live Is To Die” (nearly ten minutes long).

“Metal Militia,” “Four Horsemen,” “Fight Fire,” “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” “Battery,” “Master Of Puppets,” “Disposable Heroes,” “One,” “To Live Is To Die” and the other masterpieces of their early albums make Metallica one of the most important bands of the decade, and Master Of Puppets one of the most influential albums ever.

Metallica (Elektra, 1991), the “black album,” unveiled another of their masterpieces—and one of the most grandiose—“Enter Sandman” (panzer cadence, textbook guitar progression, raw and brazen chorus, instrumental bridge fueling dramatic tension, chorus, coda), and once again probed the darkest recesses of the human soul (“Of Wolf and Man,” “My Friend of Misery”). But overall, it marked the start of a regression toward a more human sound: only three tracks are played at thrash tempo. At the same time, the group prepared a less “black” future with the delicate existential ballad “The Unforgiven,” orchestrated with evocative guitar arrangements and consecrated by a poignant melody, and the pathetic “Nothing Else Matters,” clearly grafted onto British folk and arranged with a large string section (recalling the Moody Blues’ “Nights In White Satin”). Metallica were on the edge of pop metal, but with the class of a classical orchestra. Having abandoned the intellectual experimentation of the previous album, the group seemed instead to rediscover the value of melody and gothic atmospheres: the metaphysical conjurer of “Sad But True” relies on psychological sound rather than red-hot bullets. Behind the grim riffs of “Don’t Tread On Me” lie vaudeville airs, Grand Guignol, Broadway musicals—even “The God That Failed.” Traces of raga even surface in the existential dirge “Wherever I May Roam” (again, based on a monumental but not epileptic riff). “The Struggle Within” closes with military tones and a return to the whiplashes of Kill ’Em All. It is the least spectacular work of their career: Metallica’s tremendous sonic machine seems restrained, forced to run below capacity.

By putting order into chaos, by giving sense to the senseless, Metallica lost their greatest strength: their sonic reflection on the origins, structure, and ultimate purpose of Pain. Their aesthetics of Evil had always been deeper than average, entrusted largely to a subtle perception of the fracture between need and refusal, promise and disappointment, expectation and awareness; of the human condition of “excess,” of the aberrant, the paroxysmal. But that anxiety had its roots precisely in chaos (moral before even musical), in the complex relationship between powerful, irrational tensions. Their ability to identify with the “I” of the mass of alienated and abused adolescents now diminished precisely because those tensions had been leveled—and, ultimately, denied.

Load (Elektra, 1996), the first studio album in five years (and 79 minutes of it!), is quintessential Metallica, to the point that heavy metal's most revolutionary band becomes an ultra-conservative act when it comes to its own style. Each album is different in details, but very similar in overall scope. Here the melodic style of Metallica (the ethereal and atmospheric Until It Sleeps, the mid-tempo elegy Hero The Day, the country-rocker Mama Said) keeps the sound accessible to the masses, while only the 10-minute The Outlaw Torn delves into progressive-metal.
Between the lines, one hears more of a southern boogie accent in Ain't My Bitch, perhaps the most radio-friendly of the batch (and relatively light by Metallica's standards), the slow-burning blues 2x4, Poor Twisted Me, a shuffle in the manner of Norman Greenbaum's Spirit In The Sky, and in the Rolling Stones-ian blues Ronnie) that may simply indicate the advancing age of the members. Worse: the Deep Purple-ian, syncopated King Nothing, the lengthy, anthemic Bleeding Me, the solemn, gothic The House Jack Built pack a bunch of cliches with the imagination of a third-rate Metallica imitaror. Metallica's music has evolved subtly, from a ponderous tank to a slim submarine. But this album is mainly disappointing: a lot of filler to embellish a few melodic ideas, while the power of previous albums seems to have been reduced to a repertory of derivative moves.

Reload (Vertigo, 1997) collects songs that did not make it to the previous album. All of Metallica stereotypes are present and... overly familiar (Slither and Bad Seed quote past Metallica classics). On the other hand, the leftovers highlight the quiet side of Metallica, sliding from the blues-rock of Fuel to the mid tempo of The Memory Remains, from the power-ballad Where The Wild Things Are to the folk-rock of My Eyes.

Metallica seem to have reached a point of saturation. After that album of leftovers, they released an album of covers, Garage Inc (Vertigo, 1998), and a live with the San Francisco Symphony (Vertigo, 1999).

St Anger (Elektra, 2003) was their worst record yet. This is an album that was designed to suck. And it succeeded.

Death Magnetic (2008), the first to feature Robert Trujillo on bass, was a decent product of a band that at least spent some time figuring out what to play, but most songs were annoyingly reminiscent of previous items of their catalog, with only a few generating excitement beyond competence. It is not a coincidence that the production was the most aggressive of their career, as if trying to disguise creative weakness with sheer loudness. That Was Just Your Life opens the album with an elegantly varied guitar workout, from syncopated to panzer-like. The End Of The Line is a guitar and bass showcase, recapitulating their technique of smooth transitions and high drama. A bit rougher, The Judas Kiss indulges in a complex narrative format with frequent changes. The power ballads is where experience helps the most: The Day That Never Comes (blessed with another galactic guitar-bass coda) and especially The Unforgiven III, that shows the three stage to Metallica's take off: piano and violin, repetitive bluesy guitar, power riff. The emotional journey from the visceral shout of All Nightmare Long (with the guitar that alternates syncopated and galloping styles) to the final hysterical roar of My Apocalypse feels light-weight despite the profusion of technical prowess (or precisely because of it). Broken Beat & Scarred is the song that sticks closer to the Metallica canon (but also the most predictable). It is almost refreshing to hear the influence of post-rock on the ten-minute instrumental Suicide and Redemption (pomp built via fractured guitar melody, manic repetitions and breathless crescendoes) but it comes a decade after dozens of metal bands had incoporated post-rock in their routines. Lengthy songs of great instrumental sophistication, but little substance.

Lulu (Warner, 2011) was a failed collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica (see the Lou Reed page).

The EP Beyond Magnetic (2011) collects leftovers from the sessions of Death Magnetic (2008).

Other than Atlas Rise it is hard to save anything from the 78-minute double-disc Hardwired To Self-Destruct (2016), a collection of generic riffs, solos and beats structured in epic-length compositions of little substance.

72 Seasons (2023), another bloated album, is similarly flawed. Metallica's classic sound is on display in If Darkness Had A Son, 72 Seasons and Crown of Barbed Wire, and there are appropriate "thrashy" moments in the three-minute single Lux Aeterna and in Too Far Gone, but one has to wait 60 minutes before hearing something truly interesting in the eleven-minute Inamorata. Too much of it is filler. The guitar solos are particularly disappointing.