Metallica

The group, formed in Los Angeles, took to the extreme the intuitions of thirty years of violent rock. At the very moment when heavy metal was becoming one of the most commercially successful genres and a staple of MTV, Metallica led the opposition, restoring to the genre its anti-establishment aura, in terms mediated by the most hardcore punk rock. It was the tape No Life 'Til Leather (1982) that made them a cult phenomenon among headbangers of the Hollywood Strip, thanks to the wild energy of Jump In The Fire and Seek And Destroy. A few months before the release of their first album, Hammett (formerly of Exodus) replaced original guitarist Dave Mustaine (who in the meantime went on to form Megadeth).

The album Kill Em All (Megaforce, 1983 Elektra, 1987) made history with its dark, desperate sound and the sharp tone of the guitars leading the sonic assault. Hit The Lights sets the standard: epileptic drumming, the singer's obsessive fervor, dizzying solos that push rock and roll to the extreme, and continuous abrasive bursts of bass and guitars.
The anthem Four Horsemen has more solemn accents: the rhythm slows down and the refrain rises into a true melody, while the guitars animate the narrative with constant changes of theme and increasingly exuberant solos.
The machine-gun bursts of Whiplash return to the incendiary atmosphere of Hit The Lights, but make it even more violent and stripped-down. The wild quadrille of Phantom Lord keeps the tension high while the singing rants in a Gothic and psychotic delirium. No Remorse slows down into a powerful panzer-like cadence, but the singer continues his bombastic sermon. The guitars run rampant and uncontrollably. Metal Militia delivers the final blow with another electrifying jolt of guitars.
Motorbreath (all at a charging pace and ending with a supersonic solo) and the frantic Seek & Destroy (a limping Hendrix-like riff that coalesces into an obsessive staccato) also demonstrate the band's technical qualities. Pulling Teeth, which opens with two minutes of melodic distortion from Cliff Burton's bass, launches into a series of galactic distortions over the drums' driving rock and roll.
These majestic tracks, built on the martial rumble of Cliff Burton's bass, Ulrich's frenetic pounding, and Richie Blackmore-like shrill guitar barrages, alternating with compelling charging passages, set the entire movement in motion.

In 1983, Metallica moved to El Cerrito, in the Bay Area.

More controlled and considered, Ride The Lightning (Megaforce, 1984) was musically also more varied and mature, rich on the one hand in Hammett's usual breathtaking gallops (Fight Fire is perhaps his masterpiece) and on the other in more conventional horrific ballads (the melodic For Whom The Bells Toll, the acoustic Fade To Black), on the one hand in ever-dizzying slam-dance (Trapped Under Ice) and on the other in long sarabands of deafening chaos (the nine minutes of the instrumental Ktulu).
Reacting to the vulgar, bourgeois theatrics of the glam metal that dominated the Los Angeles scene, Metallica had fused melodic metal with the speed, momentum, and apocalyptic lyrics of thrash-punk. Three decades of the art of the "hard" riff, from Rumble to You Really Got Me, are sublimated in the furious rampages of Hammett and Ulrich. Reacting against the vulgar, bourgeois theatrics of glam metal dominating the Los Angeles scene, Metallica fused melodic metal with the speed, drive, and apocalyptic lyrics of thrash punk. Three decades of hard riff science, from Rumble to You Really Got Me, are sublimated in Hammett's and Ulrich's furious raids.

The album Master Of Puppets (Elektra, 1986), despite the methodical boycott exercised by the media against them, became a best-seller, thanks to more demanding lyrics, a more elaborate song form (three tracks run for more than eight minutes), and an arrangement that was almost Baroque (for them), both in the epileptic anthems such as Battery and in the military barrages of Leper Messiah and Thing That Should Not Be, both in the melodic ballad Welcome Home and in the incandescent bacchanal of Disposable Heroes. The guitar is the undisputed protagonist, the true "voice" of the sound. Hetfield challenges Page's legacy with the romantic glissandi of Master Of Puppets and buries Van Halen beneath a whole series of incendiary acrobatics scattered everywhere like acts of guerrilla terrorism, although he then showboats in the new instrumental showcase of Orion.

And Justice For All (Elektra, 1988), with a new bassist replacing Burton (who died in a road accident in 1986), consecrated their creative "art-metal" in the Olympus of heavy metal, an approach that ignores the genre's commercial rules and instead indulges in complex architectures of free-form stylistic devices, although the album itself goes overboard in emphasis and brutality (the title track, Frayed Ends Of Sanity), in theatricality and melodrama (One, practically a remake of Fade To Black), and in "narrative" devices (the hiccupping riffs, the martial rhythms) repeated to the point of nausea, finding pathos and epic grandeur only in the obligatory instrumental of the moment, To Live Is To Die (now approaching ten minutes).

Metal Militia, Four Horsemen, Fight Fire, For Whom The Bell Tolls, Battery, Master Of Puppets, Disposable Heroes, One, To Live Is To Die, and the other masterpieces from the early records make Metallica one of the most important bands of the decade and Master Of Puppets one of the most influential albums.

Metallica (Elektra, 1991), the "Black" album, serves up another of their masterpieces, and one of the most grandiose, Enter Sandman (panzer cadence, textbook guitar progression, raw and brazen chorus, instrumental bridge that builds the dramatic tension, chorus, coda), and once again rummages through the darkest recesses of the human soul (Of Wolf And Man, My Friend Of Misery), but in general marks the beginning of a regression toward a more human sound: only three tracks are in "thrash" tempo.
At the same time the band prepares itself for a less "black" future with the delicate existential ballad The Unforgiven, suggestively orchestrated by the guitars and crowned by a heartrending melody, and the pathetic Nothing Else Matters, clearly grafted onto the body of British folk and arranged with a substantial string section (to the point of recalling Nights In White Satin by the Moody Blues). Metallica are on the verge of pop metal, but with the class of a classical orchestra.
Having abandoned the intellectual experimentation of the previous album, the band instead seems to rediscover the value of melody and Gothic atmospheres: the metaphysical pitchman of Sad But True relies on a psychological sound rather than on red-hot bullets. Behind the grim guitar playing of Don't Tread On Me there even lurk the airs of vaudeville, Grand Guignol, and Broadway musicals. The same goes for The God That Failed. Even traces of raga emerge in the existential "dirge" of Wherever I May Roam (and once again the backbone is a monumental but non-epileptic riff)
The Struggle Within closes on military tones and with a return to the lashes of Kill 'Em All.
It is the least spectacular work of their career: Metallica's tremendous sound machine seems restrained, made to run below its normal speed.

By putting order into chaos, by giving sense to the senseless, Metallica lost their greatest strength: their sonic reflection on the origins, structure, and ultimate purpose of Pain. Their aesthetics of Evil had always been deeper than average, entrusted largely to a subtle perception of the fracture between need and refusal, promise and disappointment, expectation and awareness; of the human condition of excess, of the aberrant, the paroxysmal. But that anxiety had its roots precisely in chaos (moral before even musical), in the complex relationship between powerful, irrational tensions. Their ability to identify with the I of the mass of alienated and abused adolescents now diminished precisely because those tensions had been leveled and, ultimately, denied.

Load (Elektra, 1996), the first studio album in five years (and 79 minutes of it!), is quintessential Metallica, to the point that heavy metal's most revolutionary band becomes an ultra-conservative act when it comes to its own style. Each album is different in details, but very similar in overall scope. Here the melodic style of Metallica (the ethereal and atmospheric Until It Sleeps, the mid-tempo elegy Hero The Day, the country-rocker Mama Said) keeps the sound accessible to the masses, while only the 10-minute The Outlaw Torn delves into progressive-metal.
Between the lines, one hears more of a southern boogie accent in Ain't My Bitch, perhaps the most radio-friendly of the batch (and relatively light by Metallica's standards), the slow-burning blues 2x4, Poor Twisted Me, a shuffle in the manner of Norman Greenbaum's Spirit In The Sky, and in the Rolling Stones-ian blues Ronnie) that may simply indicate the advancing age of the members. Worse: the Deep Purple-ian, syncopated King Nothing, the lengthy, anthemic Bleeding Me, the solemn, gothic The House Jack Built pack a bunch of cliches with the imagination of a third-rate Metallica imitaror. Metallica's music has evolved subtly, from a ponderous tank to a slim submarine. But this album is mainly disappointing: a lot of filler to embellish a few melodic ideas, while the power of previous albums seems to have been reduced to a repertory of derivative moves.

Reload (Vertigo, 1997) collects songs that did not make it to the previous album. All of Metallica stereotypes are present and... overly familiar (Slither and Bad Seed quote past Metallica classics). On the other hand, the leftovers highlight the quiet side of Metallica, sliding from the blues-rock of Fuel to the mid tempo of The Memory Remains, from the power-ballad Where The Wild Things Are to the folk-rock of My Eyes.

Metallica seem to have reached a point of saturation. After that album of leftovers, they released an album of covers, Garage Inc (Vertigo, 1998), and a live with the San Francisco Symphony (Vertigo, 1999).

St Anger (Elektra, 2003) was their worst record yet. This is an album that was designed to suck. And it succeeded.

Death Magnetic (2008), the first to feature Robert Trujillo on bass, was a decent product of a band that at least spent some time figuring out what to play, but most songs were annoyingly reminiscent of previous items of their catalog, with only a few generating excitement beyond competence. It is not a coincidence that the production was the most aggressive of their career, as if trying to disguise creative weakness with sheer loudness. That Was Just Your Life opens the album with an elegantly varied guitar workout, from syncopated to panzer-like. The End Of The Line is a guitar and bass showcase, recapitulating their technique of smooth transitions and high drama. A bit rougher, The Judas Kiss indulges in a complex narrative format with frequent changes. The power ballads is where experience helps the most: The Day That Never Comes (blessed with another galactic guitar-bass coda) and especially The Unforgiven III, that shows the three stage to Metallica's take off: piano and violin, repetitive bluesy guitar, power riff. The emotional journey from the visceral shout of All Nightmare Long (with the guitar that alternates syncopated and galloping styles) to the final hysterical roar of My Apocalypse feels light-weight despite the profusion of technical prowess (or precisely because of it). Broken Beat & Scarred is the song that sticks closer to the Metallica canon (but also the most predictable). It is almost refreshing to hear the influence of post-rock on the ten-minute instrumental Suicide and Redemption (pomp built via fractured guitar melody, manic repetitions and breathless crescendoes) but it comes a decade after dozens of metal bands had incoporated post-rock in their routines. Lengthy songs of great instrumental sophistication, but little substance.

Lulu (Warner, 2011) was a failed collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica (see the Lou Reed page).

The EP Beyond Magnetic (2011) collects leftovers from the sessions of Death Magnetic (2008).

Other than Atlas Rise it is hard to save anything from the 78-minute double-disc Hardwired To Self-Destruct (2016), a collection of generic riffs, solos and beats structured in epic-length compositions of little substance.

72 Seasons (2023), another bloated album, is similarly flawed. Metallica's classic sound is on display in If Darkness Had A Son, 72 Seasons and Crown of Barbed Wire, and there are appropriate "thrashy" moments in the three-minute single Lux Aeterna and in Too Far Gone, but one has to wait 60 minutes before hearing something truly interesting in the eleven-minute Inamorata. Too much of it is filler. The guitar solos are particularly disappointing.