Nothing else remains
Metallica ★★★★
Metallica (Remastered Deluxe Box Set) BLACKENED RECORDINGS/WARNERS. C/CD+DVD/LP
Thirty years on, Hetfield, Ulrich (and Hammett!) clear out the vaults from their ‘Black Album’ period. By Andrew Perry.
IN THE highfalutin critical conversation, Nirvana’s Nevermind ‘won’ 1991-92 in mainstream rock, because it initiated the breakthrough of alternative culture. In commercial terms, however, it was actually pipped to the post by another dark horse – Metallica’s self-titled fifth long-player, which concurrently saw the titans of thrash metal streamline their sound for FM-radio airplay amid uproar from their purist cult fanbase.
With Metallica pegged just above
Nevermind as the 16th biggest-selling single-artist album ever, James Hetfield’s crew will now pull further ahead with a raft of remasters, including possibly the biggest all-time box set for one album – a whopping 27 discs.
Of course, this peerlessly successhungry group have never baulked at letting it all hang out, for cash. In 2004’s Some Kind Of Monster movie, they famously exposed their disagreements during ‘performance enhancement coaching’, and to a similar degree the bonus material here lays bare their inner workings at a transitional juncture, with three full CDs of early-stage demos and ‘writing in progress’ sessions, before you even get to two more containing alternate mixes and outtakes.
In amongst a couple of hours of press-interview audio (a first in such packages?), Hetfield reveals to MOJO’s David Fricke how he’d had the title for Metallica’s flagship tune, Enter Sandman, knocking around for years. “Everyone hated it,” he guffaws, “but this time I finally found something to match it up with.” That ingredient emerges on ‘Kirk’s Riff Tapes II’, just as an introductory arpeggio from guitarist Kirk Hammett, which then gets turned into a song by Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich across various sessions in JulyAugust 1990. Listeners can equally trace through the genesis of the other 11 numbers in forensic detail.
Ulrich, in his Fricke interview, reveals that the album’s other game-changer, brooding ballad Nothing Else Matters, unusually arrived as a complete versechorus song from Hetfield, and that producer Bob Rock duly encouraged the bullish frontman to mine his more vulnerable side.
Certainly, listening back to the full album in its meticulous clarity today, you’re struck by how slow it is, especially as contrasted with parts of the live set recorded at the USSR’s Tushino Airfield in September ’91, the month after release. This much-bootlegged show from “Moss-cow” finds Metallica discreetly unveiling their new direction, in among the full-throttle ’80s-vintage carnage of Master Of Puppets, Battery and Whiplash.
By ’92-93, they were slaying stadia from Sacramento to Mannheim at their leisure, busting out eight-minute bass solos (included here) and versions of Budgie’s Breadfan alike.
As if this £175 casket of delights was not enough to seal Metallica’s ongoing metal supremacy, a separate quadruple tribute album of 53 covers of its 12 tracks lands simultaneously (see page 92), doubtless ensuring the band’s ecstasy of gold from this classic record will only intensify.