Post Reply - Metallica Appreciation Thread

 

Metallica came along, with Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer not far behind, and left all those great bands in the dust (for a while - I've since got back into all of them, although AC/DC have always remained a favourite) - but after AJFA, I really felt that thrash had run its course and done pretty much everything it could - although maybe "Reign in Blood" was the ultimate thrash statement - or "Scum".

 

Metallica seemed to agree, with the Black album, which ushered in a new era of heaviness - proving that it didn't have to be fast or complicated to be bone-crushingly heavy, and I waited with bated breath to see what Load would be like.

 

I was completely gutted - to me, it was awful, and Re-Load worse - and, unbelievablty, St Anger the worst of the lot.

 

Death Magnetic was a welcome partial return to form - although it feels a little forced - and a bit late, given the invention of other bands. There's also the issue of the mastering (not the mixing - the mix is awesome, but the CD mastering is poor, and the vinyl mastering is a horrendous waste of vinyl).

 

Metallica's first 5 albums are astonishing, even today, and Metallica deserve their position at the top ot the metal tree, IMO, especially given the trail they blazed wide open for others - metal was a dirty word until "One" received its debut on MTV.

 

I'm very annoyed at their big "anti-piracy" campaign - not because I condone piracy (which I emphatically do not!), but because of the astonishing, bare-faced hipocrisy of the band.

 

Consider the way they started;

 

They stole the name - Lars is on record as using this exact term.

 

They used riffs and licks wholesale from other bands, mostly obscure - OK, so did Led Zep, Deep Purple et al, but, like the many acts that have successfully sued the latter, they did not give the bands credit, except in a few cases, such as Diamond Head, Blitzkrieg and Holocaust.

 

It was much later that they acknowledged (albeit in a roundabout way) some of their "influences", with Lar's involvement in a NWoBHM compilation that featured many of the bands they "stole" from (I put "stole" in inverted commas because every idea that Metallica took, they improved on, so to my mind, that's not really stealing - I'd just prefer it if they acknowledged the source and thanked bands like Vardis, Bleak House, Saxon et al).

 

The biggest hipocrisy, however, lies in their dealing with Napster - considering the way Metallica got to the position they did - by trading and copying cassette tapes, so the original artistes lost potentially thousands, so that they could use the ideas themselves and profit.

 

That sucks.

 

 

But Metallica's music on the first 5 albums is amazing.

 

I always get annoyed when I read about "sloppy playing" - compared with their peers, Metallica were so tight it was frankly unbelievable. The only real competition they had was from Megadeth in that department - although Metallica sold far more records - not for being more technically competent than Megadeth, but for writing the heavy metal music that a wider cross section of music fans actually wanted to listen to.