• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 306 0

opener, in this case ‘Blackened’; lyrically a howl of rage against the destruction of the environment, musically very much in the mould of ‘Battery’, although less effective, and the only track on the album on which Newsted gets a co-credit. From there it was on to the self-consciously epic title track, one of the longest and most tedious songs the band would ever record. Built around a quirky Ulrich drum tattoo and the sound of marching guitars, with James railing against how ‘Justice is lost / Justice is raped / Justice is gone…’, at almost ten minutes long, ‘Justice’ digs its own grave and buries itself, eliciting a huge sigh of relief from the listener when it finally – finally – slams to a halt. It’s not that it’s such a bad Metallica track – it would have shone more brightly on Ride, perhaps, where the band was still establishing its credentials, and Hammett’s guitars, for which he receives the first of his three co-writing credits, are exemplary. It’s just that the whole endeavour is so earnest, bitter, unrelenting, that there is little of real excitement here, just the unhappy sound of one man and his pain. Similarly, the samey-sounding tribute-to-Cliff instrumental ‘To Live is to Die’ was a sincere gesture rendered almost meaningless by the fact that it’s the longest track on an album choked with tracks that outstay their welcome.

The rest of the album – with one notable exception – continued along the same dark, tangled path. Again, it’s not that tracks such as ‘The Shortest Straw’ or ‘The Frayed Ends of Sanity’ are outright bad – both typically brutish rockers that would have taken pride of place on Ride, perhaps – but after the sophisticated production and arrangements on Master and the warm, all-inclusive atmosphere of Garage Days, more was now expected of Metallica. Right at the moment they should have been delivering another sonic milestone, they had reverted to boorish type. What would have sounded scaldingly new four years before now sounded lumpen and off the pace.

Even the first single from the album, ‘Harvester of Sorrow’, was horribly plodding. ‘Lyrically, this song is about someone who leads a very normal life, has a wife and three kids, and all of a sudden one day, he just snaps and starts killing the people around him,’ Lars explained at the time. If only the music had sounded even half as interesting; the fact that it reached Number Twenty in the UK charts was probably down to the by-now-huge Metallica fan base that was ready to buy whatever the band did next, plus the variety of different formats Phonogram were now able to market the record in. Similarly, the next track fed to US radio, although not physically released as a single, ‘Eye of the Beholder’ – coming straight after the title track on the album, it sounded simply like more of the same, its saving grace on radio that its faded-in staccato rhythm was attention-grabbing enough to sustain the listener through the first couple of minutes before its droning repetitiveness finally zeroed you out. ‘Do you see what I see?’ James intones solemnly. ‘Truth is an offence…’, but clearly nobody had dared tell the band the truth about their new album.

The exception to all this – the sole gleaming diamond in the dirt – was the track ‘One’; Metallica’s most ambitious and successful musical experiment yet, and their most deeply affecting song. The macabre story of an infantryman who steps on a landmine and wakes to gradually discover he has lost everything – his arms and legs, his five senses – except his mind, which is now cast adrift, trapped in its own grim and impossible reality, ‘One’ was both nightmare writ large and musically transcendent journey. It was a thrash metal Tommy in miniature, depicting the protagonist’s descent into living hell, wordlessly begging for death, capable of being seen both as existential metaphor for the human condition and the solipsism of the rock star life, its frantic climax also serving to relate a state of inarticulate teenage angst like no other rock song before or since.

Partially based on the 1939 Dalton Trumbo