Killing Your Idols Vol. 1: Mediocritallica - 50%
Master of Puppets is probably at this point remembered less as a music recording than as a cultural institution, a collective memory among white Gen Xers, disaffected teenagers then and 45-year-old dads with “crossover utility vehicles” and mortgages now, and, thus disconnected from the historical and musical context it originated from, it became perhaps the most overblown, overhyped, and overrated album of the entire 1980s. If you are to believe the cultural narrative surrounding the possibly billion-dollar gravy train that is Metallica, that they invented thrash metal and that this album was some kind of massive leap forward in sophistication for heavy metal. Anthrax guitarist/bandleader Scott Ian, who really should know better considering he was there at the time, talked about Metallica having “taken Beethoven pills or something” in a recent article.
Never mind that Metallica were just a part of a musical movement that emerged organically in both the US and Europe in the early 1980s, itself the inexorable confluence of other heavy music genres that were already well established by the time Metallica got started in 1981; never mind that bands like Manilla Road, Queensryche, Fates Warning and Watchtower had already been pursuing aggressive yet complex “thinking man’s metal” for years before this album came out and doing it better; never mind the incredibly limited musical vocabulary of this music (none of which even remotely resembles anything Beethoven wrote or would have considered writing); never mind that their cast-off lead guitarist Dave Mustaine’s band Megadeth wrote better songs, played faster, and worked harder at every turn up until the middle 1990s. Metallica got to the top by selling the impression of taking their fundamentally simplistic blues-based music to a higher compositional plane, but unlike albums like The Spectre Within or Energetic Disassembly, Master of Puppets (and its successor ...And Justice For All, although that one was slightly more adventurous) wouldn’t challenge the expectations of rock listeners or introduce any truly novel ideas. If you’ve heard a decent amount of hard rock music written between 1970 and 1990, even if you’ve heard nothing besides that before in your entire life, you will “get” Master of Puppets straight away.
The white American rock audience are probably the most incurious audience of music listeners in the world, so it’s no surprise Master of Puppets made Metallica superstars, as what Metallica were selling, perhaps even from day one, was thrash metal rock music that eliminated things that could challenge or alienate Joe Middle America, a heavy metal Elvis Presley in the worst possible sense. In lieu of the terrifying irrational chaos of Slayer, the toweringly complicated rhythmic architectures of Watchtower, the virtuosic showmanship of Megadeth, or the relentless hammering brutality of Kreator, Metallica had comfortably familiar blues-rock scales and riffs and the sheer energy of four alienated, genuinely pissed-off teenagers. But by 1985 Metallica weren’t teenagers anymore, and their real-world troubles had dissolved in torrents of money, attention, and alcohol as they now lived full-time in the fucked-up, ass-backwards anti-reality of show business. Another “Whiplash” or “Fight Fire with Fire” wasn’t going to happen, and Slayer and the Germans had them massively outgunned both in terms of both sonic violence and musical ingenuity. So in come the blues rock licks, and some jam band noodling when they want to calm things down a bit, because Uncle Ron’s jazz and classical records were so boring so they never absorbed any of it (and, thus, neither could they absorb Rainbow or Fates Warning), and their mothers didn’t let them listen to “urban” music. The mediocrity of Metallica resonated with the mediocrity of white America and made them one of the most powerful cultural forces of the end of the 20th century (at least until the rise of Nirvana, an even more quintessential white mediocrity band, in whose orbit mainstream rock trends revolve to this day).
The mediocrity extends to the performers themselves. Much has been written, of course, about Lars Ulrich’s numerous shortcomings as a drummer, but a lot of those issue arose in the ‘90s and his performance here is quite competent, if not very imaginative and peppered with gratuitous, awkward fills. It’s Kirk Hammett who is the worst performer here—a shreddy, noodly nonentity who plays pentatonic scales and blues licks fast, but not that fast, and sometimes he trips over himself, botching runs and including clams that sound horrible against the underlying chords. Sometimes he uses the wah-wah pedal to conceal a sloppy ornament or inject artificial pathos into his solos, a habit that would get worse in later albums. His solos worked, more or less, on their first two albums, both because his simplistic “ME ANGRY” shredding bursts worked with the youthful, punkish rage of the music instead of against it, and also because many of the solos were written by Dave Mustaine and he was just doing his own take on Mustaine’s originals, but his playing is woefully inadequate for an album with calm melodic interludes and eight-minute songs.
Cliff Burton’s talent is nearly as overrated as Metallica itself, Burton having ascended after his untimely death to the pantheon of bass gods having done little, if anything, to justify being put in the same company as Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke, Steve DiGiorgio, or even second-tier godlings like Chris Squire or Michael Grosskopf. He was a quite adequate root hammerer, but adequate was all he was at the bass’s central job of holding down the rhythmic foundation, when he wasn’t abdicating it entirely to James Hetfield’s curiously bass-like palm muting technique. His (extremely rare) solos don’t have the sort of dual function of rhythm and melody great bass solos usually have, and instead are essentially guitar solos transposed down an octave for the bass. Since he was playing licks and melodies written to sound good on an instrument of a completely different register, timbre, agility, and character from his own, these solos sound extremely forced and don’t complement any of the music around them. Contrast his playing to the subtle yet devilishly intricate combined counterpoint and rhythm David Ellefson plays on Megadeth’s Peace Sells (also from 1986) and Ellefson’s superiority is obvious. Burton did have much better lead phrasing than Hammett and knew a few classical melodic ideas but as Hetfield and Ulrich were writing the vast majority of the music and Burton was rarely even audible, very few of them were used well.
So it fell to James Hetfield, raised on bourbon-soaked hard rock, punk, and crusty old British metal albums that were ancient history by the time the recording sessions came along, to do most of the heavy lifting. His speed, stamina, and precision really were quite formidable, especially live, but he had and still has a very limited musical understanding and imagination, and his interesting melodies were mostly used up writing the first two albums. His trademark chugga-chugga jackhammer pattern that is now the most well-worn cliché in the heavy metal songwriting toolkit gets much more insistent and repetitive in this album, to the point where it gets outright annoying, especially in the directionless riff salad of “Disposable Heroes”. Hetfield, as usual, also handles the singing and it...exists; it’s a very plain, vaguely melodic shout that you’re not likely to embarrass yourself too much trying to imitate at karaoke night, lacking both the feral screeching aggression of his singing on the first two albums and the gravitas and genuine melodicism of the next two.
But, if you’re a sheltered Middle American white kid raised entirely on your parents’ rock music, it sure looks like an advance in sophistication. Metallica have eight-minute songs! There’s an instrumental! But because it’s not really that complex or harsh or dissonant, it didn’t push such kids out of their comfort zone like genuinely advanced metal bands of the era. And sure, this album did lead many of them to explore heavy metal (and other musical genres) more deeply, but just as many were happy to have Metallica as an easier-to-swallow substitute. Metallica were safe; they didn’t have any alien chromatic solos or confusing counterpoint or deliberate dissonance or truly breakneck tempos or belting high-pitched singing that could make a virulently homophobic ‘80s boy insecure about both his sexuality and his singing talents, and led to a flood of other watered-down albums that were like it but managed to be worse by being an imitation of put-on heavy metal rather than the actual put-on.
The lyrics on this album try to delve into weightier, more real-world-relevant topics with songs discussing drug addiction (“Battery” and “Master of Puppets”), the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill by society (“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”), anti-war themes (“Disposable Heroes”, which says absolutely nothing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” hadn’t said on the previous album), and the ‘80s metal standard anti-televangelist rant (“Leper Messiah”—what did leprosy sufferers ever do to deserve being compared to Creflo Dollar?) but all of them fail at adequately handling their subject matter. First of all, this is Metallica, and everything Metallica does is mixed with constant vainglorious, macho swaggering, so a song like “Master of Puppets” is perpetually confused about whether it’s about how insidious drug addiction is or how badass Metallica are—you always get the feeling that like Donald Trump, the only thing Metallica really want to talk about is themselves. “Sanitarium” is particularly dreadful—nobody in Metallica has a goddamn clue what mental illness is like, and even if they did their money would shelter them from any institutional abuses, and the whiny, petulant refrain of “just leave me alone” sounds like James Hetfield talking back to his mother after being told to clean his room instead of an assertion of his humanity in the face of authorities vested with the power to incarcerate him, drug him, and surgically mutilate his brain. From this unconvincing sullen dreariness, the song then takes a complete about-face and is suddenly an equally unconvincing anthem about how the patients are going to overpower the staff (with what weapons?) and escape, because of course Metallica would never submit to the directives of a mental institution (yes, yes they would, if their childish meltdowns in front of their overpaid kiss-ass counselor in 2004’s melodramatic “documentary” Some Kind of Monster are any indication). In light of this yawning intellectual void it’s no surprise that the least objectionable lyrics are those to “The Thing That Should Not Be” (Cthulhu is really scary, booga-booga-booga) and “Damage Inc.” (literally just Metallica bragging about themselves for five minutes), where they forego any attempt at putting on sophisticated airs and just let their troglodytic macho-man schtick run free. Turn off your brain, throw up the horns, forget that you could be listening to something better instead.
I purchased this album on vinyl from Metallica’s own new record label Blackened Recordings, supposedly an independent company owned by the band themselves, but my hopes that a self-financed and self-owned label might treat the music recording with more respect than the multi-headed corporate Hydra of Warner Music Group did, but this has got one of those awful, lazy remasters that have been standard issue with every reissue of an old recording since around 1997—intrusive punched-up kick drums and a heaping helping of dynamic range compression to bury all the fine details of the original mix in noise, because it sounds “better” on $12 gas-station earbuds. As usual with heavily compressed metal albums, it sounds worse the heavier it gets, and only in the quiet sections do you get an impression of the original mix, which was pretty good by Atlantic’s low standards, but not great, very clear and with plenty of space between the instruments, but with a weak bass and muddy, uncontrolled snare drum reverb.
“Battery” starts the record off with essentially a rehash of Ride the Lightning’s opener “Fight Fire with Fire” with new riffs, but the pace is about 50 beats per minute short of the original and the musicians’ playing is far more relaxed, and it comes off as more of an angry uptempo boogie than a raging thrasher. The dainty acoustic intro thing had been a bit of amusing irony to juxtapose against the nihilistic, apocalyptic frenzy of “Fight Fire with Fire”, but “Battery” tries it again, and this time it’s a complete waste of time. When the thrash riffs finally take over, it’s less a shock to the system than a relief that a transparent attempt to dress up this song as something it is not is over. The riffs aren’t as dark or as interesting either, and the Iron Maiden-like dual harmony guitar part from “Fight Fire with Fire” was axed and replaced with more blues scale noodling from Hammett—the guitars go meedley meedley mee and wow wow wooooow and I completely check out because I can predict his next notes before he plays them.
The first half of “Master of Puppets” has by far the best set of riffs on the album, and would have been an excellent simple midpaced thrasher if it had been kept short and concise, but the verses are padded out with riff repetition and endless bridges, and then the metal stops and they bring in really dull bluesy Grateful Dead-ish noodling—normally quieter interludes in metal are supposed to retain and transform some of the momentum from the earlier part, but this essentially functions as a giant “reset” button for the whole song, a total anticlimax, and really, I find it inexcusable—even Manowar could figure out how to do dynamic changes without deflating the tension in their longer songs, and they teetered on the ragged edge of idiotic, childish self-parody through the entire ‘80s (naturally, they fell right into the darkest, cheesiest depths once the ‘90s came around). The heavy riffs come back to close the song with a last go-around of the chorus (always with the chroruses, Metallica), but since the middle of the song was a complete disaster the recapitulation feels less like a triumphant return than yet more repetition of a song that should have been over four minutes ago.
“The Thing That Should Not Be” was initially a song I was willing to defend against metalhead charges of being a dullard groove-metal song of the type Pantera would later shit out by the dozen, and while I still think it has a bit more class than Pantera with its subtle (subtlety! In Metallica!) transformations of the main riff in various ways, the entire song is nonetheless built around just one midpaced mosh riff and derivatives, with no variation in tempo, mood, or overall rhythm at all. This is the sort of song that becomes more and more tedious the more you listen to it and realize how little content there really is, it kind of reminds me (and bear with me here, I’m going out on a limb) Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia, which at first listen seems quite clever in its juxtaposition and transformation of two contrasting melodic themes, but that’s it, that’s all there is to the piece (well aside from Orientalist racism, but that’s another subject for another review…), and as you listen to it a few more times, you’ll see through its simplistic construction and trite emotional appeals and get completely sick of it. So it is with this, it is way less clever than it originally looks and is actually quite a cheap and nasty piece of music.
I’ve already taken “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” to task for its lyrics, but the music only contributes to the onslaught of absurd bathos that is almost certainly the worst song on the album. This is a typical remake of Judas Priest’s “Beyond the Realms of Death” like a thousand metal ballads before it, but even more derivative than usual because Metallica couldn’t write an “epic” melody to save themselves and just reach into their bag of recycled blues rock ideas instead. This completely ruins the form because the original song and all the derivatives that are any good work by using imaginative lead guitar playing and a powerful, convincing singer to create a contrast between the bleak, borderline self-annihilating depression of the verses and a chorus that boldly, defiantly reasserts one’s autonomy and subjectivity, culminating in a hysterical, virtuosic guitar solo, thereby dragging a listener who has the right sort of alienation to buy into it through an emotional wringer, Metallica just suceeded in writing a mawkish hard rock ballad that wallows in the pettiest of teenage resentment and doesn’t even begin to approach its supposed subject matter with the seriousness it deserves. Kirk Hammett’s solos are especially awful here, with his execrable “weeping” blue notes bent in the most generic possible way at the most generic possible times. The ballad eventually gives way to some quite respectable thrash riffs and even dual harmonized leads that sound straight off (a reject from) Ride the Lightning, but it’s far too late to redeem all the garbage that came before it, and Kirk Hammett plays two more solos, blowing his blooze load all over the music just as it was getting mildly interesting. There are at least five guitar solos in this song and they’re all terrible.
Though “Sanitarium” got my pick for the worst due to its wretchedly childish sentimental angst, “Disposable Heroes” gives it a run for its money through sheer, unrelenting boredom. The bulk of this song is built on amelodic single-chord bashing on repetitive triplet patterns, and ceaseless, tuneless Yorkshire Terrier barking from Hetfield. “BACK TO THE FRONT! BACK TO THE FRONT! BACK TO THE FRONT!” For the love of Christ, someone send him to the front so he’ll shut the fuck up already! Until he blew his voice out in the ‘90s and developed that fake redneck accent, this was the single worst performance of his entire career, and yes, I’m including his “nine-year-old’s Paul Di’Anno impression” clean singing voice from the 1982 demos in that assessment. It just goes on and on for eight nearly unbearable minutes, with the only respite being a faceless blues solo from Hammett (so, not a respite at all). “Leper Messiah” is very similar, only it bashes a bit slower and there’s a slightly more melodic B-section in the middle—I’ve heard it compared to (and sometimes accused of being a plagiarism of) Dave Mustaine, but Dave Mustaine tried harder than this.
And then comes “Orion”. The instrumental coat rack that late ‘80s Metallica’s reputation as a “progressive” band is hung on. “Orion” is Cliff Burton’s baby, and he actually puts in a very impressive performance...that you cannot fucking hear aside from a couple of gimmicky guitar-like leads. Seriously, I had to go to YouTube and listen to a fan remix with the bass cranked up, and he actually does some pretty cool stuff on here. And nobody else does. The rest of the band, the only thing you hear in Flemming Rasmussen’s original mix, all follow the path of least resistance, and Kirk Hammett vomits out two of the most flatulent, derivative, hollow, shoddy, manipulative, obvious blues-rock solos ever recorded. Everything in these solos is done the laziest and most shopworn way possible, and then, instead of orchestrating the skeleton Cliff Burton provided with his bass line in the melodic middle section, they all double him. They just mindlessly trail after Burton like kids following the Pied Piper, because counterpoint might scare the stupid people or something, and you can’t even hear Burton much in the original mix, so the whole thing comes off as a pointless noodlefest. With a second root canal of Kirk Hammett’s guitar dentistry as a segue, they bring back the best riff from the heavy part of the song and run it into the ground by repeating it constantly as it slowly fades out. They don’t even do something like Rainbow’s “Stargazer” where they layer more and more florid ornamentation over it as it fades out to keep it interesting, you just get Hetfield chugging and chugging and chugging some more until silence mercifully overtakes them.
“Damage, Inc.” is the only real full-throttle thrasher on this album, so of course it does the same sort of atmospheric bass chords as the mellow diet-prog song before it, for no reason whatsoever. Just like Battery, this intro feels completely disconnected from the actual song and a complete waste of space, and it’s compounded by being the same gimmick used to introduce two songs in a row (and then, with Burton being dead, James Hetfield imitates it on guitar for the intro to “Blackened” on the next album, so if you listen to the albums in order you get the same gimmick intro three times in a row. Even Disturbed aren’t this lazy). The song proper sounds like a timid, hesitant dry run for the harrowing “Dyers Eve” on ...And Justice for All, but the genuine hatred and bitterness that ran through that song and gave its triplet-based palm muting exercises life are absent here, both because the lyrics are Metallica waving their dicks around instead of James Hetfield confessing a real anger in his life, and they put far more effort into both the songwriting and the performances on the later song. Sure, it’s heavy, and you can bang your head all day to it, but “being pretty heavy” wasn’t good enough by 1986, not with bands like Kreator, Bathory, Sepultura, and Possessed running around. It was mediocre. Metallica were mediocre. A mediocre rock band for a mediocre rock audience, convinced that nothing outside their suburban bubble mattered at all.