Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [200]
There were highlights but they were few: the ferociously catchy opening track, ‘Fuel’, would have sounded at home on any previous Metallica album, its lyric a wonderfully concise metaphor for those who drive their lives like their cars: too fast. ‘The Memory Remains’, released as the first single, was another fine moment, on the surface an old-fashioned riff-heavy metal song, about the perils of stardom, only let down in its overcompensating desire to snazzy things up by featuring Marianne Faithfull in a completely perfunctory rasping cameo, da-da-da-ing to no discernible effect, other than the principal aim of making the band seem cool, even Hetfield getting sucked into the postmodern mire with his throwaway line: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust, fade to black…’. The band would perform the song with Faithful on both Top of the Pops and Saturday Night Live, the latter helping push the single into the US Top Forty – their last appearance there for twelve years. The single of ‘Memory’ also contained the full 10:48 version of ‘The Outlaw Torn’, retitled ‘The Outlaw Torn (Unencumbered by Manufacturing Restrictions Version)’ along with an explanation on the single’s back cover of why the ‘cool-ass jam at the end of “Outlaw” got chopped’ from Load. Still wanting to have their cake and eat it, the ‘M’ from the original Metallica logo was now used to make a shuriken-like symbol known as the ‘Ninja Star’, which became an alternative logo on this and other future releases and merchandising items.
Less interesting but still somehow a cut above the rest of the album is ‘The Unforgiven II’, which comes with the same Few Dollars More intro as the original but then gives way to a plodding riff, although Hammett’s guitar almost saves it, the whole echoing the original melody and its restrained vocal, but ultimately collapsing under its inability to come up with something new and genuinely different. The only other half-decent track is ‘Low Man’s Lyric’, which at over seven minutes is far too long for this funereal-paced dirge, but does at least start out more interesting, the hurdy-gurdy (by Bernado Bigalli) and violin (by David Miles) adding a relief texture, with lyrics which appear to find James begging forgiveness for what sounds suspiciously like the infidelity of the long-distance rock star. It was like a bizarre sea shanty in which the captain begs not to go down with the ship.
Elsewhere, however, it was truly turgid fare such as ‘Devil’s Dance’, a poor attempt at stoner rock – then the coming thing – with lots of brilliantly played but pointless guitar; ‘Better Than You’, which sounds like it could have come from an inferior Nine Inch Nails or possibly Marilyn Manson session. ‘Can’t stop the train from rolling,’ James intones solemnly, like a sleepwalker. When the single version won the 1998 Grammy for ‘Best Metal Performance’ it was a toss-up between who was most sick: the group who recorded it to prove there was more to them than just metal, or the genuine metal fans who wouldn’t have been seen dead listening to it. Then there was the generic rock of the interchangeable ‘Slither’ and ‘Bad Seed’, the dreadfully titled, musically uneventful ‘Carp Diem Baby’, and, worst of all, the even more dreadfully titled ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, stolen from the children’s book but, unlike ‘Enter Sandman’, with nothing whatsoever added to it, musically or lyrically, to make you feel they’d enlarged or reconfigured the story, rather than just swiping the title ’cos it sounded ‘cool’. This last, also, tellingly, was the only track on Load or Reload where Jason gets a co-credit. Then just when you think it can’t possibly get any worse, there is ‘Prince