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By Root 504 0

of dollars for everyone involved – shedding the thrash stigmata before beating the grunge hordes at their own game – the one enemy Metallica could not finally overcome, it seemed, was itself. No longer young, never remotely pretty, bloated by fame and success and full, suddenly, of the kind of hubris that had destroyed the original rock giants at whose feet they had once worshipped, Metallica now appeared more dead than alive, existing off past glories, one of the all-time greats, but of increasingly less relevance to those who would own the new century about to dawn.

In November 1998, exactly a year after Reload, had come the double CD, Garage Inc., its first disc comprising eleven newly recorded cover versions, its second disc a sixteen-track compilation of the original Garage Days Revisited EP/mini-album, plus all the covers recorded for their various singles’ B-sides over the years. With the new tracks recorded in the same spirit as the old – laid down as-live in the studio, warts and all (or as many as producer Bob Rock could, in all conscience, allow) – both CDs absolutely crackled with energy, providing a fine counterpoint to the airlessly manicured sound of Load and Reload, as though Metallica had rediscovered its inner animal. Yet there was a heavy air of contrivance hovering over the package like a bad smell. Released, in part, to combat bootleg sales of albums containing such relatively rare material, Garage Inc. was also an attempt to claw back some of the credibility with the metal community Metallica had sacrificed in its mid-1990s ‘reinvention’, while at the same time retaining the extra dimension of the band’s image Lars and Kirk had worked so hard to stimulate. So while the original Metallica logo returns to the front cover, the band shot – once again by Anton Corbijn – has them posing as grease monkeys outside their ‘garage’, with Lars, who doesn’t smoke, holding a cigarette, and Kirk still trying to look cool in eyeliner and sculpted tash, brandishing a stogie and a bottle of beer, odd accoutrements for a working mechanic. The accompanying booklet is once again designed by Andie Airfix and retains the same fashionably distressed look and feel as the Load and Reload designs, although its design places one foot deliberately in the past by reproducing the original artworks for the Garage Days and ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch vinyl sleeves, along with a series of chronologically arranged pictures and memorabilia from the archives going all the way back to the Mustaine era.

The choice of material on Disc One also reflects the desire to keep faith with the past while retaining their newly à la mode edge. Among the inevitable Diamond Head cover (‘It’s Electric’) and nod to the 1980s hardcore metal scene (a medley of Mercyful Fate songs), the whole thing is book-ended by covers of two songs by early Eighties Brit-punks Discharge (‘Free Speech for the Dumb’ and ‘The More I See’). There are also no less than five covers of signature tunes from 1970s bands that either directly influenced Metallica (‘Sabbra Cadabra’ by Black Sabbath; ‘Astronomy’ by Blue Öyster Cult; ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ by Thin Lizzy) or had had some impact since (‘Turn the Page’ by Bob Seeger, heard for the first time on his car radio as Lars was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge en route to his mansion in Marin County). There are also two indirect acknowledgements of the influence Cliff Burton had on the band in ‘Tuesday’s Gone’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd and ‘Die, Die My Darling’ by The Misfits. And, finally, one overt example of aligning themselves with the present generation of invulnerably credible rock goliaths in a commanding version of ‘Loverman’, from the 1994 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Let Love In.

Released in time for the Christmas gift-buying market, Garage Inc. satisfied the needs of a market geared to greatest hits packages, without the album actually being labelled as one, while at the same time both extending and consolidating the cross-promotional demographic of the now vastly disparate Metallica fan base. Fun but not too frivolous,