Tweet
From the vaults: Metallica – Metallica/’The Black Album’ (1991)
‘Ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-dede-dede-de-dedur’. It’s a hell of a riff – as simple as it is powerful – and one which propelled a grubby metallic beast to the heights of a stadium crushing colossus. Whether they ultimately gained more than they lost in the process has been debated pretty much since ‘Enter Sandman’ hit MTV 20 years ago. Whatever side you take on that debate – that Metallica ‘died’ when they decided to write songs that a) had personal lyrical inflections and b) where not 8 minutes long; or that ‘The Black Album’ was the culmination of almost a decade of music revolutionizing heavy metal – it’s pretty hard to deny that it’s a classic record. To note that it’s the biggest selling heavy metal record ever is to be a little disparaging – it’s one of the biggest selling records EVER, in ANY genre. For a band who began life playing as hard, fast and aggressive as possible that’s something of an enigma.
So, they must have ‘sold out’, right? Who really cares? ‘The Black Album’ sold in droves because it contained fucking good songs: yes, it was promoted with lots of singles and videos; and yes, Metallica’s seemingly relentless ability to tour was a contributing factor, but you can’t peddle shit for long, and this record has been bought – and loved – consistently for 20 years. And those songs, man, those songs. The sheer heaviness of ‘Sad But True’ – a song which alternates from delicate to crushing, anthemic to unnerving, and is an equal to any other metal classic – still surprises all of these later. But listening to ‘The Black Album’ now, it’s the deeper cuts that hit hardest: the precision power riffage ‘Holier Than Thou’ – which builds and builds towards a torrent of energy – and savage rage of ‘The Struggle Within’ kick like mules and blow out of the speakers. Both were really thrash songs dressed in Bob Rock’s pretty production, and they snarl through the veneer. Indeed, for all the ‘sell out’ BS it’s hard to deny that ‘The Black Album’ was something of a Trojan horse – an album which smuggled a much heavier form of metal into the households of suburbia. The jackhammer riff of ‘The God That Failed’ – gaga gagagaga GA gaga GA gaga GA ga gaga GA – and primeval stomp ‘Of Wolf And Man’ are the bedrock of that power. And it’s in that heaviness that the real triumph of this record lies. By taking a much heavier form of music to the mainstream – or ramming it in there, you decide – Metallica opened the door for bands like Pantera, Slipknot and Lamb of God to be huge. Who could have imagined that in 1985?
When an album hits big, however, there’s always a downside: familiarity breeds contempt. Even the best songs suffer from being overplayed. ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – a beautiful and more rustic take on power-balladry – and ‘Enter Sandman’ suffer that bane. Metallica’s hardcore fanbase probably barely listen to them these days. That each saw a move forward on the ‘less is more’ approach to song-writing is significant, however, because it encapsulates the success of this record: the recognition that speed and violence do not necessarily equal power. You could argue that Hetfield and co. had recognized that as early as ‘Ride the Lightning’ – featuring mid-paced rumblers like ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Escape’ and the ballad-mongering ‘Fade To Black’ – but it found its greatest exercise here in the art of concision. ‘The Unforgiven’, ‘Wherever I May Roam’ ‘Through The Never’ and the aforementioned ‘Sandman’ all combined the hallmarks of Metallica’s earlier works – hulking riffs, thundering drums, histrionic solos and Hetfield’s aggressive vocal delivery – but welded it to bigger hooks and a production that left space between the players, allowing the songs to breathe and pulsate, and creating a sound that was cavernous, soaring, huge. Even 20 years on, the production astonishes.
But it’s that overplaying that has diminished the album’s reputation – we’re now so far away from its initial impact that it’s impossible to recapture it. No-one would argue that this album had the impact on music in a creative sense that the band’s earlier work had: it didn’t spawn copyists in the same way that their thrash masterpieces did. In a sense ‘The Black Album’s’ impact was more diffuse than direct. If ‘Kill ‘em All’ marked a beginning and ‘Master of Puppets’ showed heavy metal the possibilities of what it could achieve, ‘The Black Album’ marked an end: an end of heavy metal in its traditional form. It did so by being superlative. In the ‘70s ‘heavy metal’ was an umbrella term for a lot of bands that did not really fit into a pigeonhole: Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Rainbow and Judas Priest were all heavy, but they were also very different beasts. It was in 1980 with Priest’s ‘British Steel’ – an album which, like ‘The Black Album’, stripped back the somewhat fissiparous sound to something simpler and welded it to a bigger and crisper production – that heavy metal found a template, both creatively and aesthetically. The twin guitar assault, duel leads, speed, aggression and the sonic boom of the vocals all chrystalized there in a way which they hadn’t done before, and much of the metal of the 80s – at least in the centre-ground – replicated Priest’s mandate mercilessly. In one sense, ‘The Black Album’ was both its nirvana and nadir: the distillation of those component parts of their purest and most powerful, and wedded to the added heaviness of the underground.
That album – combined with the beginning of Maiden’s years in the wilderness and Halford’s exit from Priest – marked the end of a creative paradigm as much as it offered metal new creative opportunities. In the two decades since the genre has splintered into an array of sub-genres – death metal, black metal, grindcore, nu metal, metalcore – each of which have yielded considerable successes. Sometimes greatness doesn’t inspire diffidence but deviance – that Metallica had made ‘The Black Record’ meant that nobody else could do or had to. Loved and hated, revered and reviled in equally measure, it’s an album which opened as many doors as it closed, a capstone on metal’s past which meant that future bands had to forge very different creative paths. When you listen to the songs though, you can’t help but feel the gargantuan weight of its power: seismic, casuistic and boundlessly heavy metal propelled by riff after riff after riff.
‘Ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-da-de-de-dur, ba-dede-dede-de-dedur’. It’s a hell of a riff – as simple as it is powerful – and one which propelled a grubby metallic beast to the heights of a stadium crushing colossus. Whether they ultimately gained more than they lost in the process has been debated pretty much since ‘Enter Sandman’ hit MTV 20 years ago. Whatever side you take on that debate – that Metallica ‘died’ when they decided to write songs that a) had personal lyrical inflections and b) where not 8 minutes long; or that ‘The Black Album’ was the culmination of almost a decade of music revolutionizing heavy metal – it’s pretty hard to deny that it’s a classic record. To note that it’s the biggest selling heavy metal record ever is to be a little disparaging – it’s one of the biggest selling records EVER, in ANY genre. For a band who began life playing as hard, fast and aggressive as possible that’s something of an enigma.
So, they must have ‘sold out’, right? Who really cares? ‘The Black Album’ sold in droves because it contained fucking good songs: yes, it was promoted with lots of singles and videos; and yes, Metallica’s seemingly relentless ability to tour was a contributing factor, but you can’t peddle shit for long, and this record has been bought – and loved – consistently for 20 years. And those songs, man, those songs. The sheer heaviness of ‘Sad But True’ – a song which alternates from delicate to crushing, anthemic to unnerving, and is an equal to any other metal classic – still surprises all of these later. But listening to ‘The Black Album’ now, it’s the deeper cuts that hit hardest: the precision power riffage ‘Holier Than Thou’ – which builds and builds towards a torrent of energy – and savage rage of ‘The Struggle Within’ kick like mules and blow out of the speakers. Both were really thrash songs dressed in Bob Rock’s pretty production, and they snarl through the veneer. Indeed, for all the ‘sell out’ BS it’s hard to deny that ‘The Black Album’ was something of a Trojan horse – an album which smuggled a much heavier form of metal into the households of suburbia. The jackhammer riff of ‘The God That Failed’ – gaga gagagaga GA gaga GA gaga GA ga gaga GA – and primeval stomp ‘Of Wolf And Man’ are the bedrock of that power. And it’s in that heaviness that the real triumph of this record lies. By taking a much heavier form of music to the mainstream – or ramming it in there, you decide – Metallica opened the door for bands like Pantera, Slipknot and Lamb of God to be huge. Who could have imagined that in 1985?
When an album hits big, however, there’s always a downside: familiarity breeds contempt. Even the best songs suffer from being overplayed. ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – a beautiful and more rustic take on power-balladry – and ‘Enter Sandman’ suffer that bane. Metallica’s hardcore fanbase probably barely listen to them these days. That each saw a move forward on the ‘less is more’ approach to song-writing is significant, however, because it encapsulates the success of this record: the recognition that speed and violence do not necessarily equal power. You could argue that Hetfield and co. had recognized that as early as ‘Ride the Lightning’ – featuring mid-paced rumblers like ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Escape’ and the ballad-mongering ‘Fade To Black’ – but it found its greatest exercise here in the art of concision. ‘The Unforgiven’, ‘Wherever I May Roam’ ‘Through The Never’ and the aforementioned ‘Sandman’ all combined the hallmarks of Metallica’s earlier works – hulking riffs, thundering drums, histrionic solos and Hetfield’s aggressive vocal delivery – but welded it to bigger hooks and a production that left space between the players, allowing the songs to breathe and pulsate, and creating a sound that was cavernous, soaring, huge. Even 20 years on, the production astonishes.
But it’s that overplaying that has diminished the album’s reputation – we’re now so far away from its initial impact that it’s impossible to recapture it. No-one would argue that this album had the impact on music in a creative sense that the band’s earlier work had: it didn’t spawn copyists in the same way that their thrash masterpieces did. In a sense ‘The Black Album’s’ impact was more diffuse than direct. If ‘Kill ‘em All’ marked a beginning and ‘Master of Puppets’ showed heavy metal the possibilities of what it could achieve, ‘The Black Album’ marked an end: an end of heavy metal in its traditional form. It did so by being superlative. In the ‘70s ‘heavy metal’ was an umbrella term for a lot of bands that did not really fit into a pigeonhole: Uriah Heep, Black Sabbath, Rainbow and Judas Priest were all heavy, but they were also very different beasts. It was in 1980 with Priest’s ‘British Steel’ – an album which, like ‘The Black Album’, stripped back the somewhat fissiparous sound to something simpler and welded it to a bigger and crisper production – that heavy metal found a template, both creatively and aesthetically. The twin guitar assault, duel leads, speed, aggression and the sonic boom of the vocals all chrystalized there in a way which they hadn’t done before, and much of the metal of the 80s – at least in the centre-ground – replicated Priest’s mandate mercilessly. In one sense, ‘The Black Album’ was both its nirvana and nadir: the distillation of those component parts of their purest and most powerful, and wedded to the added heaviness of the underground.
That album – combined with the beginning of Maiden’s years in the wilderness and Halford’s exit from Priest – marked the end of a creative paradigm as much as it offered metal new creative opportunities. In the two decades since the genre has splintered into an array of sub-genres – death metal, black metal, grindcore, nu metal, metalcore – each of which have yielded considerable successes. Sometimes greatness doesn’t inspire diffidence but deviance – that Metallica had made ‘The Black Record’ meant that nobody else could do or had to. Loved and hated, revered and reviled in equally measure, it’s an album which opened as many doors as it closed, a capstone on metal’s past which meant that future bands had to forge very different creative paths. When you listen to the songs though, you can’t help but feel the gargantuan weight of its power: seismic, casuistic and boundlessly heavy metal propelled by riff after riff after riff.
Comment