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By Root 355 0

with echo – to the rat-tat-tat of its flag-waving finale ‘Metal Militia’, replete with end-zone effects of marching soldiers, this was the sound of a young band announcing itself from the rooftops, remaking the world in its own image, and doing it with all the zit-faced arrogance and faltering, still-learning-to-shave steps only a very young and brash new band can. Production-wise, all the numbers previously gathered on cassettes such as No Life ’til Leather and the various live tapes appear in obviously superior versions, while the addition of Burton and Hammett clearly signals a more sophisticated melodic dimension, actually slowing one or two numbers down a fraction, adding even more weight to the hammer-swinging rhythms.

Early on, Jonny Z had identified ‘The Mechanix’ as the stand-out No Life track. Sure enough, it’s also the most impressive overall moment on the album, albeit re-presented in altered, much-improved form as a track now called ‘The Four Horsemen’. Ron McGovney had always considered Mustaine’s original lyrics ‘ridiculous’. The others had been less outspoken – until Mustaine was finally out of the picture, at which point Hetfield completely rewrote them. Gone were Dave’s cringe-inducing double-entendres – ‘Made my drive shaft crank…made my pistons bulge…made my ball bearings melt from the heat…’ – and in came some typically doom-laden Hetfield musings, mixing the metal-by-numbers imagery of lines such as ‘dying since the day you were born’ with yet more self-referential stuff about ‘horsemen…drawing nearer, on the leather steeds they ride…’ Musically, while its chugging main riff still owed a lot to Kiss’s ‘Detroit Rock City’, it was also the lengthiest, most complex piece on the album, full of surprising one-off motifs and thus the compositional progenitor of the increasingly complex, determinedly progressive material that Metallica would become famous for throughout the 1980s. Pitched at a considerably slower pace than Mustaine had always driven it along at, it also allowed the band to show themselves off in their best light, Burton’s swooning bass underpinning the juddering riffs with a classically framed, ascending progression that eventually gives way to a much more understated guitar solo from Hammett than the frenzied strafing Mustaine had always favoured. It’s a hugely ambitious number from a band still finding its feet in the studio, as if they had bolted together, Frankenstein-like, the still living parts of several other, now dead songs; one showing off their speed metal credentials, another showcasing Burton and Hammett’s abilities to introduce a much more textured approach. Similarly, the tracks ‘Phantom Lord’ (another of the four tracks Mustaine is given a songwriter co-credit for) and ‘No Remorse’ (one of the four credited just to Hetfield and Ulrich, with riff partially lifted from ‘Hocus Pocus’ by Focus) both demonstrated that there was even more to Metallica than Jonny Z’s ‘thunder’. There was crooked lightning to be had too, highs and lows, moon and stars – a whole new musical horizon coming quite suddenly into view.

The other major highlight, though, was one of the album’s shortest tracks, ‘Whiplash’. Inspired by the wild antics of one Ray Burch, a major Metallica fan from San Francisco, who had already distinguished himself at several of their Bay Area shows by almost knocking himself out (hence also the oblique Burch-inspired dedication on the back of the album sleeve: ‘bang that head that doesn’t bang’), as its title suggests, ‘Whiplash’ cracked along at a furious pace, sounding like a cross between prime-time ‘Ace of Spades’-era Motörhead and something even faster from the first, dementedly speedy Damned album. Every track on Metal up Your Ass teemed with energy but ‘Whiplash’ really does sound like the start of something new; as snotty as the rawest British punk and as rhythmically fleet-footed as early, shotgun-tempo Van Halen. There are other blisteringly paced moments on the album, such as ‘Motorbreath’ – a simple, four-chord verse and stop-start chorus, credited solely to Hetfield,