Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [226]
‘He’s all about the big picture,’ said Lars of the earliest sessions with Rubin. ‘He doesn’t analyse things like drum tempos or tell James to play something in F sharp. He’s more about the feel: is everyone playing together? Rick’s a vibe guy.’ Or, as Rubin put it: ‘The right sound reaches its hand out and finds its way. So much of what I do is just being present and listening for that right sound.’ Quick to praise, he was also swift to pass judgement. ‘There’s not a lot of grey with him,’ said Lars. ‘He really speaks his mind. Either something’s great or something sucks.’
Rick had known Lars, James and Kirk for years, but they had never worked with him before and came new to his methods. ‘Imagine you’re not Metallica,’ Rubin had told them early on. ‘You don’t have any hits to play, and you have to come up with material to play in a battle of the bands. What do you sound like?’ This was the sort of statement, James decided, that gave the project instant ‘focus’. According to Lars, ‘Rick said he wanted to make the definitive Metallica record.’ For Rubin – a true metal fan who’d once turned down the opportunity of working with Ozzy Osbourne, he told me, ‘because I’m only really interested in making a classic Black Sabbath album that tries to recapture that golden era’ – that was code for making the sort of Metallica album that had only previously been thought possible during the Cliff Burton era. Or as Lars put it: ‘Every time there was a fork in the road, we said, “In 1985, we would have done this.”’ Rob Trujillo, from his more typically down-to-earth perspective, had simply remarked on the fact that Rubin insisted they stand up in the studio while playing ‘and rock out, like we would live’.
The end product, as promised, harked back explicitly to the band’s 1980s albums – now, a generation on, considered classics of the genre – even down to the new album’s pre-CD choice of just ten tracks. All but one was over six minutes long – another clear sign of the album’s focus – and all were credited equally to all four members, something that had decidedly not happened back in the Eighties. Any hope that this might really be some sort of return to the golden era of Metallica is quickly extinguished, however, with the opening brace of tracks, ‘That Was Just Your Life’ and ‘The End of the Line’. Both over seven minutes long; both, on first listening at least, plucked wholesale from the top deck of the Ride the Lightning chocolate box; both all but forgotten minutes after they have juddered to their predictably explosive climaxes – like most of the album, in fact. This is not to say that tracks such as ‘Broken, Beat & Scarred’ (over six minutes) or ‘The Day That Never Comes’ (almost eight) aren’t solid, full-on Metallica recordings: the latter is redolent of some sort of built-in-the-laboratory Load-meets-Justice hybrid that starts off relatively quietly then takes off halfway through into an all-out Iron Maiden-style freak-out; the former is like a more conventional, if much better mixed, outtake from Justice, down to its pillaging of the guitar solo from ‘One’. It’s just that there is little that lingers in the memory in the same way ‘Creeping Death’ or ‘Leper Messiah’ did the first times you heard them.
The dreadfully titled ‘All Nightmare Long’, another near-eight-minute old-school thrash epic shot through the prism of Rubin’s 21st-century production values and the best track on the album, finds James downstroking his guitar with genuine ferocity as Kirk seems to make up for all the solos he never got to play on St. Anger by jam-packing them in here. The formidably bouncy ‘Cyanide’ which follows (over six minutes) sounds like something from Master via the best of Load, if that’s possible, and it dawns that for