Metallica

It's so easy to hate The Black Album. It was the fatal stroke, the stake to the heart, the last passably listenable Metallica release. At the time it was needed, Metallica's brand of ever escalating thrash had overstuffed itself with And Justice For All and The Black Album served as a necessary palate cleanser. So I understand the reset but I cannot forgive what they did with it. The success of this record went to their heads. It ruined them and hindsight makes it all the more difficult to sift out the value of this recording in any sort of objective manner because it is so shrouded in thickening emotion and with Metallica still around rubbing our faces in their continually descending mediocrity, well, it makes it all the more difficult.

That The Black Album is seminal is indisputable. Personal feelings aside, it was a landmark in heavy metal, one of the high-selling records of all-time. It captured a zeitgeist so effectively that it remains for many the most important album of their lives, whether they still listen to it or not, whether they even care to admit it. The Black Album brought legions into metal (for better or worse, worse mostly I'm afraid). In terms of legitimizing metal, still a mostly underground phenomenon, with the mainstream, it is as important a record as Black Sabbath's Paranoid and AC/DC's Back In Black, though musically it pales in comparison to both.

What Metallica had achieved in the trajectory from Kill 'Em All to And Justice For All is simply amazing and had they split up afterward, their legacy would still stand untarnished. Even with the indelible stain of the last twenty years hanging over them, those first four records remain among the best metal albums ever recorded. And The Black Album killed that momentum completely.

This record is big, loud, and dumb -- much like the generation of mainstream arena rock fans who would embrace it. Musically, it is derivative of other bands with simpler formats, seeking radio friendly, accessible hits that, while retaining their previous heaviness, sacrificed much of their intensity and complexity. That a few of these songs are actually quite catchy is unsurprising given their resulting popularity but even the best songs on The Black Album are mostly mediocre.

Opener "Enter Sandman" pretty much tells the tale. The clean opening is ominous and intriguing, as the bass and drums enter, you feel an epic in the making. The songs starts to swirl as the tension builds and builds, you await the blasting speed but are met instead with an insufferably derivative mid-tempo riff that goes nowhere. The song goes verse-chorus-verse-chorus in a fairly standard way until Kirk kicks out a decent solo (his solos throughout are generally excellent) and then James goes into a weird spoken word segue that is suitably creepy but by then the song has lost my goodwill.

"Sad But True" has a decent little headbanger of a riff but it never changes once throughout the duration of the songs five-and-a-half minutes and I'm asleep before it's over. Take this riff, use it as a bridge in a faster song, a stop-gap headbanging breather, and it would be awesome but as the singular focus of a song, it drags.

The pattern rarely varies: "Wherever I May Roam" has some decent ideas but is again too simplistic to really hold my attention; "Holier Than Thou" is lukewarm thrash that fails because you can tell their hearts aren't in it; ditto "The Struggle Within," which sounds like an AJFA b-side that was wisely left on the cutting room floor. And these are among the album's better more metal numbers.

The only songs that hold up on here for me, that I can hold out as true and worthy Metallica songs, are the ballads "Unforgiven" and "Nothing Else Matters." The latter is an epic ballad in the tradition of "Fade To Black." It is brilliantly and sensitively constructed, possessing multiple layers of composition and performance, and yet quite moving in it's lyrical sentiment. The former is mid-paced perfection, with it's rolling intro, creepy atmospherics, and blazing solos. These songs would not have been out of place on any of their previous three albums and as an overall direction for the band would've been more fruitful than the dreadful arena rockers they stuffed this record with.

Credit where credit is due, this album sounds amazing. Bob Rock gave them the sound they wanted. The guitars are huge, razor sharp yet full-bodied. Jason's bass is audible (I'm sure to his relief). The drums are slightly overpowering and harsh in the mix but pumped at the mega-decibels needed for outdoor arenas, it's perfect. I can't grudge them their choice, though I wish they'd dumped him again after this record.

In the end, The Black Album is fairly execrable. I could forgive it were it but a blip on the radar. But it wasn't. It presaged doom not just for Metallica but for metal in general. For The Black Album's legacy taints Megadeth as well (Countdown To Extinction may be a better attempt at a Black Album but it still started them on their downward slide as well). And then there were the hordes of slavish imitators who chucked their hard work in favor of easy hits. As successful as this record was, Metallica has never really recovered from it. They tried to fruitlessly duplicate its success for awhile then have more recently scrambled to reclaim their previous legacy. None of it has worked. The monetary blessings of The Black Album were Metallica's artistic curse and that is this record's true legacy.