Actually, forget that thing I said yesterday about making a new blog just for this. It's okay if I just make this a series within this blog, right? I don't have to make another one?
It's called "Deep Cuts," and its purpose is to review out-of-the-way pop music classics; still quite famous, but perhaps off the beaten path a bit. You won't find Zoso or Abbey Road here. My first choice is
Metallica - ...And Justice for All
This, on one disc, is the popular emergence of progressive metal. The opening of "Blackened" and the album recalls the opening of Queen's A Day at the Races with "Tie Your Mother Down." The two albums share a majesty and an innovativeness, if they share nothing else.
Neither the tightness of the group nor the skill of its players can be denied. I do have immediate personal objections which are purely tonal; Mr. Hetfield's voice never howls quite to the desired intensity, and the drums are EQ'd, if not poorly, at least in disharmony with my taste. The kick drum is clicky - make of it what one will. It's common enough in metal.
It's difficult not to hear ...And Justice retrospectively, with the knowledge of virtually an entire genre which has been influenced or is directly descended from it. It's also difficult to forget how many bands have improved on what was begun here, and in leaps and bounds. Rhythm-section pummellers like Mastodon come foremostly to mind.
The music is at its best during mid-range duel guitar breaks (Mr. Hammett's super-human blues freak-outs, while technically striking, fare less well) common of acts which have come to be called "Viking metal."* Sections such as these, along with dark Celtic overtones on "One," are aggressively evocative in the most pleasant of ways. Music suggestive of madaeval magic and Druidic orgies in the woods is enough to make a listener wish the authors of these lyrics more thoroughly understood why they liked music like this (Metallica is composed of high school dropouts to the last man) rather than being content to simply bunch together trite death and darkness cliches at odds with their intriguing music.
The ironic Wizard of Oz Winkie mimic at the start of "The Frayed Ends of Sanity" seems the most painfully dated moment.
We hear the most anticipation of the future of metal - and of all progressive rock - in "To Live is to Die," an excellent showcase of Metallica's dynamic which begins with roughly three minutes of the heaviest balls-to-the-wall bludgeoning on the album before proceeding to a section reminiscent of the softer "One," with some spoken word vocal in there somewhere. As usual, the group's at its finest when the lyrics are beside the point and ignorable.
* Drummer Lars Ulrich has named Queen as a primary influence of Metallica, and that's never more apparent than in these sections, which employ symphonic guitar arrangements the like of which Queen's Brian May pioneered and mastered.
Gems: "To Live is to Die," "One"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment