The Wrath of Kon

It was all the rage at the time. It was what made Winger into a hit-producing machine. It was simple: take a couple of total shredmaster ultra wizards on guitar and bass, slap an obscure drummer behind them, and put a proficient yet largely unknown guy up front on mic and leather pants duty. But instead of launching through a Yngwie-like solo-fest that shows us all that you can hit every note on the fretboard four times a measure, take a big step back and write some laid-back numbers with a little feeling, and some good catchy melody. Put in a couple of good solos, have at least two or three ballads for the couples, but make it cool enough so that the Steve Vai types who are into total minor mode domination on the six-(or seven) string will still pick up a copy. Not only did this work well for Winger, but it was pretty much the formula of the Hagar-era Van Halen, too.

Mr. Big followed this formula after ex-Talas bassist Billy Sheehan finished his duties with David Lee Roth. (If you need more Van Halen connections here, it should be mentioned that Talas used to open for VH back in the day, and there was talk that Sheehan would replace Michael Anthony in the early 80s, which would have been pretty weird.) Sheehan is often called the Eddie Van Halen of the bass, as he does a lot of crazy ten-fingered tapping stuff on the four-string, including techniques like playing a chord progression on three strings while also tapping out a leading line on the other. It’s all total guitar geek shredder stuff, except on a lower register. Sheehan hooked up with Paul Gilbert, who is a bit of a guitar god himself. He started touring with bands when he was only 15, then went to GIT in California and after graduating, he immediately got an instruction spot. (He taught the guitar weirdo Buckethead, among others.) His band Racer X put out a couple of albums on Shrapnel records with a very high “whoa” factor, and he appeared in about every third page of Guitar Player magazine for most of the mid-eighties. Their four-piece was rounded out by semi-unknowns Eric Martin on vocals and Pat Torpey on drums.

The eleven-track self-titled debut from the band shows a good mix of proficiency and playability that demonstrates that you don’t need to blast through with super-fast drum beats and constant soloing to make songs work. That said, there are some faster numbers here. (I mean faster as in “not prom songs,” not faster as in Slayer.) The opening song “Addicted to That Rush” starts with Sheehan’s bass burbling at high speed like a nest of bumblebees before Gilbert jumps in and they duel lines a bit until the drums crash in and the song starts. The two work well in their ability to play together; there are parts where they are so synchronized, it sounds like one huge chord reaching from low registers to high, instead of two people playing their own lines. The album does sound slightly thin, but the bass has a very sharp and unique tone, not as high as a guitar, but almost like the sound of Stanley Clarke’s weird experimental solo basses that are tuned an octave higher.

There’s not much to be said about the vocals or lyrics on the songs. The lyrics, while bad, aren’t as bad as the way Martin has a tendency to whine or go nasal on certain things to make the lines seem really stupid. There’s a part where the lyrics are “A lover’s crime and punishment / Is do this, do that and put your eyes / Back in your head / Let’s play house instead.” Okay, that’s pretty stupid, just reading it. But the way he bunches words and emphasizes it makes you wish the verse was over and they’d go to the next solo.

Overall, each of the songs has its own groove, and they alternate between taking things easy (“Big Love”) and slightly rockier bits (“Rock & Roll,” “Merciless”). There’s one zippier song that’s my favorite on that end, “How Can You Do What You Do,” which almost seems like it was written as the “video” song, and I could see Eric Martin on a stage with no audience, wearing his leather pants and a bandana or two, singing into a large industrial fan. (They probably wouldn’t have the fan blowing trash around, like Skid Row or Motley Crue, though.)

Did I mention ballads? There are two. The second one is total cheese, called “Anything for You.” I discovered by accident that if you played this at double speed, it makes a snappy little jazz fusion number. But at regular tempo, hearing Martin dredge out “aaaaanything for youuuuu” is a bit painful. However, the other ballad, a Sheehan-penned piece called “Had Enough,” is quite good. It starts with just bass, and then adds in some very casual guitar before building up on the drums and going into the song full-steam. It’s a breakup song, and I’d be a liar if I said this thing wasn’t in my walkman constantly after my first couple of big post-dumping depresso-fests. It’s a very touching little song, because it stays laid-back and really features how Sheehan’s bass can carry a song without blowing up into full-on bassmaster lines.

Oh, and since this was the era for it, there is a “bonus track.” It’s included on both the tape and the CD, so I guess that doesn’t make it much of a bonus, but it’s a “live” track called “30 Days in the Hole.” I say “live” because this band formed in about ten seconds and rushed into the studio, so I don’t remember them playing any arenas before they recorded their album. I don’t know the origin of the song, but it sounds like maybe it’s an old cover. [It’s a Humble Pie cover, dumbass.] I always remember it though because when I arrived at college in the fall of 89 and I sat down at a computer for the first time, it required me to create a password with at least 12 characters and two of them non-letters, and “30daysinthehole” was the first thing that came to me. So for at least a semester or two, I always thought of Mr. Big when I checked my email, long after I got bored of this album.

This album’s not bad, and it still holds up to me. It was not their most popular work – I guess right after this, they did another album that got some airplay and had a couple of prom ballads. I never checked out any of their other stuff before they dropped off the earth (actually, they are, predictably, HUGE in Japan, and recorded a bunch of Japan-only albums) but I always had a sweet spot for this album, so I still find myself going back and giving it a listen.

Rating: 8

On the coattails of the wildly successful 2112, Rush decided to put out a quad-side, triple-gatefold live LP, named with a Shakespeare reference, recorded in their home town. This began a cycle where the band would release four studio albums, then bookend the era with a double live album. This time around, the band summarized their early career, an era that began as a bar band belting out Led Zeppelin-esque music, and progressing to a full-on art-rock band, complete with long-form concept pieces.

This album was recorded in historic Massey Hall in Toronto, a 2700-seat venue with a vivid past, serving as the location of classic acts from Charlie Parker to Frank Zappa. Terry Brown and crew captured their June 11-13 1976 shows on tape, from the tour supporting 2112, restructuring the order of their set into an hour-and-ninteen-minute series of two LPs’ worth of live tunes.

The older, hard rock side of Rush is solidly displayed here. They start by rocking out “Bastille Day” and then pounding through live versions of stuff like “Anthem” and “Something For Nothing,” plus medleys, like starting with “Fly By Night” and segueing into “In the Mood.” All of this shows Alex’s ability to plow through the rhythm and then switch to a screaming bluesy solo and back, without the aid of overdubs or a rhythm guitarist behind him. This is helped with Geddy’s bass, which is chunky and follows the guitar well.

If you’re looking for more in the prog vein, there is a truncated version of the first side of their latest album at the time, 2112, which removes the “Oracle” and shortens the “Discovery” sub-songs, clocking in at just over 15 minutes. (And a minor gripe is that this is tracked on the CD as a single song, so you can’t skip around easily, which sucks, because sometimes I’m in the mood to just jump to “Grand Finale” and rock that part out.) On the tail of that is a twelve-minute rendition of “By-Tor and the Snow Dog”, which is pretty faithful to the album version.

A big reason I like this album more than the other Rush live albums is there’s a lot more of the human element shown here; it’s probably the most honest of the live albums. The band isn’t spot-on perfect here, which is good. You can see the holes where overdubs weren’t compensated with walls of Taurus synth and triggered MIDI and other sampled wizardry. They got around the limitations the old-fashioned way: by improvising, cutting corners, and making it sound good. Add to this that Massey Hall isn’t a huge place. I myself am by no means a talented musician, but in college, I played bass (for one gig) for a band that played in a sold-out hall twice the size of this one. For me to think of Rush playing in a theater half that size boggles my mind. And you can hear it; There isn’t constant audience noise. For some numbers, the crowd is quiet, and then waits for the end of the song to applause. This is much more appealing to me than a giant arena where people are cheering for every second because Rush is the biggest thing in the world, or a “live” album recorded in a studio with a constant crowd sound dubbed in from a stock audio reel. This small venue dynamic shows them as a working band, just starting, still struggling. And I like that.

The small things add up, too. A few times, Alex gets a touch of feedback in places where it didn’t sound planned. Neil fills in with his cowbell here and there, and sounds like he’s having fun on the set. When they go from the slow to the heavy part of “In the End”, Geddy counts off with “one, two, buckle my shoe”. There are a lot of little fills and runs at the ends of songs that shows that they’re still organic.

Probably my favorite bit is the medley of “Working Man” and “Finding My Way,” which completely rocks out both songs, and adds a trademark drum solo by “the professor on the drum kit”. I have to say, compared to later stuff, you can tell Neil is still building his chops here. This is a pre-electronic, pre-trigger, pre-MIDI drum solo, nothing but skins and a little bit of cowbell.

A minor nit: the old CD had to clip the quad-side album at 75 minutes, and that meant dropping “What You’re Doing,” and also dropping this bit of chatter between the band members as they ran offstage and then slammed a door behind them. This got fixed in the 1997 remaster/reissue.

Overall, this is a nice time capsule and a great way to end the early hard rock era of the band. From here, things got a lot more proggy and the band left behind the desire to be another Zep clone. But it’s still fun to go back to this every once in a while and see a recap of what the band did for those first four albums.

Rating: 8

Most people who even know anything about Grim Reaper only know them from an episode of Beavis and Buttheadthat savagely made fun of a video of their most popular tune, “See You in Hell,” with one of the cartoon duo saying that they looked like a band you’d see at the county fair. If I was a typical metal fan that required total allegiance to bands that weren’t good but were still an “influence” or whatever, I would have been pretty upset by that cartoon. But, I’m not stupid like that, so I thought it was pretty damn funny, because face it: for the most part, Grim Reaper really did suck.

I actually did listen to these guys back in the day, mostly because a friend of mine made a mix tape called “Heavy Metal Hell” and it had a cut from each of the English band’s three albums. That made me rush out and buy their third (and last) album, Rock You to Hell, which made me think that even though they weren’t very original with their song titles, they sounded okay. This was also at a point when I was buying a lot of thrash metal, and maybe in comparison, it didn’t seem that bad. I lost or sold the tape a year or two later, and didn’t think much of it for a long time.

When trying to buy back a lot of my old favorites on CD, I picked up this compilation, which offered 17 cuts on one disc. As far as representing their three albums, there are most of the basics here, like “See You In Hell,” “Fear No Evil,” “Rock You To Hell,” “Waysted Love,” and “Suck It And See.” (ugh…) As you can see, these guys were not exactly prolific in the ability to come up with neat song titles. Maybe if they would have taken a note from Carcass and bought a medical thesaurus, their career would have lasted a bit longer.

Upon listening to the tracks, I really wonder why I ever liked these guys. As far as the basics, these guys are a typical NWOBHM-influenced early thrash band, with a very standard chorus-verse-solo-repeat style, nothing more. Their lead singer, Steve Grimmett, mostly belts out a bad falsetto that sounds like someone trying to imitate Don Dokken, although he occasionally does some “sexy” homoerotic grunts and “uhs” in various places. And Grimmett isn’t exactly the kind of guy you’d want up front in spandex, thrusting his codpiece against the mic stand. I guess other English frontmen like Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickenson or even Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott have been able to front a band with an equal lack of physical glam, but it just doesn’t work here. Maybe I liked this band so much in the 80s because back then, MTV didn’t play their videos, and I just didn’t know how Spinal Tap-eque they looked.

As for the actual songs, some of them are surprisingly similar, almost like they found a good melody and structure and just re-used it over and over. “See You in Hell” and “Now or Never” have such similar introductions, I thought my CD was messed up for a minute. Older stuff like “See You in Hell” sounds almost like a demo in quality, very compressed and tinny. They predictably have the cliched heavy metal “rain and thunder” intro on the song “Let the Thunder Roar”, and “Final Scream” has this weird intro with a screaming girl and a synthesized voice that is possible the worst King Diamond rip-off ever.

That said, some of cuts from their third album, Rock You to Hell, aren’t bad. I think they got the production figured out by then, with a much thicker sound, and the lead guitar work is more Dokken-eque, with good leads and tappy emphasis stuff here and there, but without totally showing off. The title cut, plus “Lust For Freedom” and “Waysted Love” are particularly decent metal from 1987. Grimmett’s vocals aren’t howling or shrieking, and although it’s not exactly Rob Halford or anything, they’re a dot or two ahead of the curve. I can’t ignore their song “Suck it and See”, though. Aside from the fact that this is a completely hilarious yet stupid song title, the actual song itself is pretty bad. You’d think with a title like that, it might be some sort of brutal, sexist theme song, like a thrashier version of “Ram it Down.” Instead, it’s this half-speed, swingy number that makes absolutely no sense.

In retrospect, I probably should have listened to these songs online somewhere and realized that it wasn’t worth having the first two albums, then bought the third and called it a day. It’s sad that a 17-song collection by a band that only had 26 published songs could actually not have two or three songs that I really wanted to hear. It’s even more sad that those 26 songs would probably fit on a CD with 40 minutes to spare. I think this whole thing is an exercise on how to not put together a collection.

Rating: 4

After the release of Keeper of the Seven Keys, Pt. 2, you’d think the world would be great for Helloween, since it cracked the top 30 in England, but instead, it turned into a world of shit for the band. First, their leader and guitar player Kai Hansen freaked out and quit the band on the verge of a tour. Then, they got a deal with EMI to buy them out of their contract with Noise Records, but it tied them up in a huge legal dispute for over two years. The product of that dispute was three live EPs, released by EMI to keep the band alive during their troubles.

I have to admit that I bought the US version of the EP when it came out. (There are also UK and Japanese versions, with different recordings, but only slightly different setlists. Oh, and the EPs have Kai Hansen on guitar, they were recorded before he split.) And for whatever reason, I listened to it a LOT. I still listen to it now and again. But I have to be honest with you: 85 percent of this 42-minute album is completely useless. I know, that’s heresey, but it’s true! Since it’s short enough, I will break it down for you track by track.

1: Intro/A Little Time: They waste a lot of time with the crowd chanting “happy Helloween.” Okay, I timed it, and it’s only like 25 seconds, but it’s such a huge waste of time, and this is a short album that’s only made to make us pay to keep thinking about the band until they put out another album, right? The song is not bad, with very Bruce Dickinson-sounding lyrics that are pretty tight, but then about three minutes in, there’s some vamping part that’s in there to kill time, probably while vocalist Michael Kiske slaps hands with people in the front row or something stupid.

2: Doctor Stein: Kiske spends TWO AND A HALF MINUTES babbling like a drunken idiot before the song starts. The song is okay, except where Kiske inserts a “1-2-3-4” before singing part of a verse, which drives me fucking homicidal.

3: Future World: About a minute and a half of rambling and guitar tomfoolery until the song starts up. Kiske tries to get the audience to sing the first verse, and only about three people know the words. For fuck’s sake, if you are singer, DO YOUR JOB and sing the song instead of trying to get the audience to sing it. Nobody cares.
Seriously. He does this in one or two other places, with predictable results. Then about six minutes into the song, they go into one of those huge audience participation wastes of time where the drums keep the same beat, and the guitar does dumb shit for six bars, and then the singer tries to get everyone to sing, etc. Iron Maiden did it on the song “Running Free” and it wasn’t even cool when they did it.

4: We Got the Right: About thirty seconds of guitar noodling, which is actually better than the song. I hate this song for some reason. It’s just mid-paced ballady bullshit. I wish the US version
of this EP had something better here.

5: I Want Out: Finally! A really good song, no stupid intros, no audience sing-alongs. Unfortunately, it only lasts four minutes, and then we get a bunch of chanting of “here we go, here we go, here we go,” as Kiske tries to rev the audience up for an encore. Another two minutes are wasted, as he sets up the next song.

6: How Many Tears: Perfect. Nine whole minutes, a great song, good solos, the lyrics are great, and it’s a great choice to end a set. THIS IS GOOD. I even like the fake finish and total speedy climax thing they do halfway through the song.

This album could be good. I’d up my score by two points if it was trimmed of all banter by the lead singer, and if track four was replaced, and maybe one other track was added to make up for the difference. I don’t have the other two import EPs, so maybe that’s what they did. But otherwise, this is just awful. This should serve as an example to all other bands who put out a live album that we really don’t care what is on your singer’s mind. Just play your damn songs. I’m sorry this is such a low review, and for some reason, I still listen to this a lot. But it’s also trained me how to operate the fast-forward on my iPod, so keep that in mind.

Rating: 5 (but the last track is like an 8)

Every once in a while, I listen to a CD that I am almost certain no human on the face of the earth would ever listen to. For example, take this CD by the Keith Emerson-derivitave band simply called 3. This CD, called …To the Power of Three consists of eight songs that are top-40 friendly in the same way that the exceedingly sterile Pink Floyd album A Momentary Lapse of Reason was supposed to be radio-friendly. With a reunion of former ELP stars Emerson on keys and drummer Carl Palmer, the band was fronted by Bay-Area producer and singer/songwriter Robert Berry.

This is a 1988 attempt at a serious rock album, back on the tail end of when Asia was charting pop tunes, and Yes actually got a smidge of mainstream airplay and even time on MTV. (Anyone else remember the April Fool’s day when they played like 267 different versions of the video “Leave It,” with the band upside down and singing? Except they swapped out band members for roadies and office staff at the studio and whoever else for the different iterations, and even played some of the commercials upside-down to keep with the joke. I know only like three people found that truly hilarious, but I was one of them…) This CD came out on the tail of an ELP reunion (but with Cozy Powell), a GTR album that sold some copies, and a few other prog-rock has-beens that picked up some Korg M1s and headless Steinberger basses and made another serious go at it. And this peaked at #97 on the Billboard 200, which tells you this formula worked to some extent.

Although it did chart, the 3 album is a pretty weak stab at world domination. Everything’s very ballady, and the sound overall is very tinny and brittle. The highlight is probably a song “Desde La Vida” that is a three-parter, the middle showing that Emerson can still get around the ivory. It’s also got a cover of “Eight Miles High” that’s marginally interesting, but the whole thing is basically 37:38 of vintage cheesomatic synth and very cookiecutter drums that could’ve been done by a synth or drum machine. Some of the songs have a slight memorable quality, but they are very much pop numbers and not prog-ish in any way, except for maybe a quick run or two on the keyboard by Emerson. It is not by any means an extension of ELP’s previous work, and even if you expect it to be 66% of something like Trilogy, you’d be very far off the mark.

I think I borrowed the tape from my friend Derik Rinehart at the time, and I’m not sure if I ever returned it (my old car had holes in the floors, many tapes didn’t make it.) A couple of years later, I found a used copy of the CD for 88 cents, and picked it up. It’s one of those albums that is definitely stuck in my head, that I listened to at the time and thought “wow, Emerson sure can play! This MIDI shit is the wave of the future!” and then got sidetracked when I found out about Primus or Nine Inch Nails or whatever else was cool at that second. Now, every once in a while, I listen to it (mostly because 3 is the first band on my iPod’s alphabetical display) and it immediately takes me back to 1988, when I listened to this stuff constantly. But yes, it’s a tough sell.

Rating: 6.5

I will get a lot of flak about this, but I’m not a big fan of this album. It’s not horrible, but to me, it’s nothing more than a mid-point between the near-perfect Kill ‘Em All and the completely perfect Master of Puppets. It doesn’t have any of the raw aggression of the former, or the fine detail or complex workmanship of the latter. It’s got good songs, and sounds okay, but it’s not an album like …Puppets.

Okay, a few things should be said here. Metallica went out with their first album and did good, and Megaforce pulled them back in the studio in 1984, pretty much with the intention of releasing another album with ten clones of “Seek and Destroy.” And moving from one good thing to the volume two of it is always problematic. Do you copy your success? Do you try to go that extra bit you didn’t get to do on the first album? Do you try completely new formulas? And Metallica (or let’s be honest, Cliff Burton) decided to do a bit of each.

There are some songs that follow what happened on the first album closely, like the anti (or maybe pro)-military “Fight Fire with Fire,” that has the fast riffs, the barking lyrics, and some screaming leads. Ditto for “Trapped Under Ice” and even more so for “Creeping Death,” a very riffy little number that actually tells the story of Moses and his battle against slavery in Egypt. But it isn’t a good-times, Davey and Goliath bible story; it’s got a real edge to it that makes it much more rockable, and forecasts the kind of work the band does on their next album. It’s also got a nice little chorus part with the lyrics “die/by my hand/I creep across the land” that people love to chant when the band plays the song in their live sets.

Another song that shows the band’s movement in a new musical direction is “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” about the Ernest Hemingway book of the same name. It’s a slow dirge that seems to almost be the antithesis of thrash metal at the time, but the sludge of the guitars and the eerie lyrics (plus the giant bell that they used) make the song so authentic and true that it still remains a hugely popular number for the band, who still play it live. The album, while not a concept album in the strictest sense, features songs that all have to do with death in very intense circumstances, and this song fits that theme well.

There is one song here that alone deserves a perfect ten, and that’s the ballad “Fade to Black.” The song, which deals with suicide, was apparently written after the band’s entire equipment truck was stolen, almost derailing their entire career. It starts with simple acoustic guitar and haunting lyrics, then builds to very powerful rhythm chords and an incredible hook brought through the distorted Marshall stack sound. The tune swaps back and forth between totally clean acoustic guitar for verses and this blinding power chord riff before launching into a much faster ending, complete with absolutely perfect, harmonic lead guitar work by Hammett. This song is probably one of the most perfect examples of heavy metal I could think of. If I were going to Mars tomorrow and could only bring one mix CD for my voyage, this song would be on it. It’s a flawless production and I love it.

The album in general has good sound, and is the first production credit for Flemming Rasmussen, who also recorded the aforementioned Master of Puppets and remained one of those strange names that every headbanger saw on the inside of their album cover and wondered if the dude was a Swedish Chef or something. (Danish, I think, and oddly enough, his biggest credit before this was engineer on a Cat Stevens album. Rasmussen also recorded …And Justice For All before getting the boot for Bob Rock and the black album.) My main complaint is that a couple of the songs, like the title cut and “Escape”, sound pretty atypical for Metallica songs, especially the vocals. It makes it sound like they were trying too hard to experiment with song structure, and it didn’t work well. And the album ends with “The Call of Ktulu”, a nine-minute instrumental snoozefest that sounds like they were listening to too much Rush that week.

Like I said, the album’s got some good cuts on it. But it doesn’t fit together well, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to listen to this start to finish without heading for the fast forward button. It’s good to see them taking the first step toward what I think might be their best album, but as an album, it doesn’t entirely work for me. I’m loath to say that, for fear of a slew of Metallifans telling me I’m wrong, but this was the kind of album for me where I’d take the two or three good songs on it and pad out that C-90 tape that I used for one of their other albums with those tracks. But it got better, much better, and it’s good to hear this in-between point.

Rating: 7.5

There’s a rumor (not much of a rumor) that this album was going to be called Metal Up Your Ass until their label’s legal team got a little concerned, and I wonder if Metallica would have become the era’s first and biggest thrash metal band if this record were not injected into every mall and record shop across the country. The four horsemen took a pile of NWOBHM metal influences from earlier European bands and mixed them with some early punk/hardcore and a dash of Motörhead to brew up these ten tracks of aggression that pretty much set the gold standard for all thrash and metal bands to follow.

You probably already own this album, and if you don’t, maybe you should steal a copy and piss off Lars. You also probably know the boring history of how Dave Mustaine got kicked out of the band and all of that, so I’ll leave that to the VH1 specials. I wouldn’t say this is their best album (it’s probably Master of Puppets), or their most important (…And Justice For All showed they could go on without Cliff. The black album showed that they could become art collectors and rich snobs), but it’s a good introduction, and it may be the most listenable of any of their stuff.

This album has been reissued at least three times, and that’s fitting, because there are essentially three groups of Metallica fan. There was an original release of the LP with just the ten basic tracks. If you are a die-hard, “go against the grain until the end” fan, as the song “Whiplash” might say, you’re going to have a tape that doesn’t have any bonus tracks. If you were a metalhead that got into the band in the first few years, you got this tape and played it until it fell apart. To you, Metallica meant raw aggression, total brutality, the loss of all control. Songs like “No Remorse,” “Seek & Destroy,” and “Metal Militia” were your way of life. You probably got started on Judas Priest and Motorhead, and needed to go that extra step. While you were banging your head to this album, all of the other dorks in your high school were listening to Stryper, or maybe Journey. You either thought that Ride the Lightning was the sell-out point for the band, or it’s possible you never heard any of the band’s later work because you were put in a Supermax prison for killing 14 cops while on angel dust.

The second release of Kill ‘Em All came with two bonus tracks, the covers “Blitzkrieg” and “Am I Evil?”. If your tape (or CD, if you were rich) had these songs, you probably got into the band later, but still in the late 80s, when they were little more than a minor phenomenon in the greater music world. That meant that you probably heard a lot of other thrash, some better than this, and some bands that were much sicker than Metallica. But you still had to listen to Metallica because they were the originals. They were the band that would never release a music video, never cut their hair, and never make the top of the music charts, but that’s what you liked. And maybe their later albums seemed a little plastic or conceptual, but you could always go back to that first album that contained the core of the band’s energy.

If you bought Kill ‘Em All in the late 90s or so and it didn’t have the bonus tracks (again), you got in after Metallica released the Garage, Inc. collection and decided to remove the bonus tracks from their albums so you’d have to buy more stuff. Metallica’s fan base obviously completely changed after the black album, when they switched to hard rock-oriented, mid-tempo ballads that were played at about every Midwestern prom in the mid-90s. What’s strange is that many of the fans of their later AOR bullshit phase still claim allegiance to the early albums, despite the fact that they are two kinds of music. It’s possible that people picked up a copy of Load, liked it so much that Metallica was their new favorite, and then went back to buy up all of their old stuff. Metallica still plays “Seek & Destroy” at their concerts, and people still love it. But it just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, if you were a fan of Fleetwood Mac at the very peak of their Rumours, Stevie Nicks-with-poofy-hair era, would you seriously go back to their late 60s, blues-oriented records and truly “get” them as much as their sickly-sweet lite-rock radio-friendly stuff?

Okay, so I’ve rambled on too much about the socioeconomic whatsis without even mentioning how the album SOUNDS. First, it’s loud. It’s got this crushing guitar attack that has Marshall amp written all over it, with a chunky rhythm that fits behind these screaming leads. Kirk Hammett’s playing at this point was fast, but almost blues-oriented in his solos. Later, after spending time with Joe Satriani and working on a modal approach to his solos, they went from the screaming blast attacks to a more organized and complex approach, but that’s later. The album doesn’t have the production that the later ones do, but it’s acceptable enough. Cliff Burton’s bass playing is good, although it’s not as present as it could have been. The one obvious exception is “Anesthesia (Pulling Teeth),” a three-and-a-half minute bass solo that pretty much started the notion (at least in the metal world) that a bass player wasn’t just a bar-per-measure guy that sat in the back and did little. Burton, although he was a late addition to the band’s existing lineup, pretty much had the most musical chops in the group, and would show this later as the band wrote more material.

The thing that surprises me about this album is how listenable many of the songs are. Some of them, like “The Four Horsemen” and “Phantom Lord” seem a little goofy after all of these years, like they were trying too hard. But songs like “No Remorse” and “Seek & Destroy” have such perfect riffs, and an incredible wall of sound to them, the chunkiness that makes it possible to put tracks 8 and 9 on repeat for a day at a time with no problems.

I’m going to say something that will piss off all die-hard Metallica fans, and it’s the reason I don’t give this a higher rating, but I think it’s true. Overall, the album is very uneven, which isn’t surprising; half of the tracks were written by Mustaine before he got the boot, and Burton’s genius doesn’t really show up across the whole album. This album is not a start-to-finish player, and what’s weird is, it never was for me. One of the advantages of having the tape way back when is that I always listened to “Whiplash,” then flipped it over, fast-forwarded a bit, and skipped “Phantom Lord.” I also used to hate “Jump in the Fire,” although it grew on me. And I almost always skipped “Metal Militia.” Now, coming back to it, some of the songs are total classics, and a few are a bit goofy. That said, this album is not perfect, but it’s still great.

Rating: 8.5

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After assuring their fans that they were alive and kicking with Jason Newsted on the bass, the remaining three horsemen plus newkid went into the studio with Flemming Rasmussen for the first five months of 1988 to record the successor to Master of Puppets. What came out was something that people either considered a great album, more conceptual and a bit speedier than the prior, or a bloated, badly produced example of a big band getting too big. Either way, it stands as an interesting historical note, because it’s after Cliff Burton, the major driving force of the band’s early career, had died, and it’s right before the band decided to trade in metal for hard rock and go to producer Bob Rock for their self-titled black album, which many new fans consider the real start to their career.

First off, AJFA is long. It’s 65 minutes and only 9 songs, with only two of them being under the six minute mark, and two of them landing just short of the ten minute mark. Everyone’s first comment about this album is that things are just too damn long, and I’d agree. Most of the songs have an extra repetition of the chorus or an extra verse that grates on my nerves, and I think if I had a good copy of the master tapes and Protools, I could probably turn out a 45-minute remix that would be just as strong as the original. But maybe that’s just me.

This album has a really eerie, sinister tone to it. Many think it’s thin, and I guess it is in parts. The biggest thing to me is that Kirk Hammett’s guitar solos and the general composition of most songs show that he’s become a much more modal player, probably based on his training with Joe Satriani. Solos go from sounding vaguely Egyptian to Mid-eastern to minor and eerie, instead of the standard blues-box licks he used on Kill ‘Em All. This trickles down into the songs a bit, changing structures and sound to be much more unique. The guitars in general are also layered and deeper than they were in the early days, and it makes the album more progressive than just straightforward thrash.

The songs on the album mostly have to do with injustice in some way or another. The title cut, which sprawls out to 9:44, talks about the loss of justice in society, in pretty simple terms. Compare that to the opening track, “Blackened,” which describes a biblical end to the world due to man’s woes. With two exceptions, most of the songs are fairly interchangeable in theme. Although they are musically different and offer varying solos, it would have been hard for me, even in 1988, to distinguish between “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” and, say, “Eye of the Beholder” without checking the liner notes first.

As far as those other two songs, one is “To Live Is to Die,” an almost-ten minute instrumental that’s built up upon a little fragment of poetry left behind by Cliff Burton. The song builds up layer after layer of creepy guitar sound by Hammett and Hetfield, with overlays of distortion and signal processing, quickly dropping into clean acoustic in places and then coming back to establish new themes. Halfway through, someone (who? Not sure…) reads the Burton poetry. The song continues on the tradition of “Orion,” an instrumental on their last album, while leaving tribute to Burton. It’s not as good of a number as “Orion,” but it’s still awesome. I remember many a night listening to this in my car alone as I drove through the darkness, and always loved it for the eerie mood it produced.

The big song on this album is “One.” It’s based on the Dalton Trumbo book Johnny Got His Gun, an anti-war novel about a man in World War I who is hit by a shell blast and loses his arms, legs, and all senses. Many people think it’s about Vietnam, and I’m sure there are Metallica fans dumb enough to now think it was written about Iraq, but you should probably hunt down the book and read it at some point. The song starts out slow with clean guitars, then breaks into more of a power ballad, as the soldier pleads for help. Later in the song, as he realizes he’s trapped forever in his comatose body, he wants to die, and the song speeds up to a frenzy of double-bass and shredding guitar solos. It’s an excellent composition, although I’m still unsure as to how it exactly became a big hit. After years of shunning MTV, the band created a video using live performance in a loft-warehouse sort of space intercut with pieces of the movie based on the Trumbo book.

The most interesting thing to me about going back to this album is to reverse-engineer some of what happened. I listen to pieces of “Harvester of Sorrow” and hear that black album, and think that if this was produced just a little bit differently, it would have ended up one of the tracks there. What if Bob Rock had been hired at this point instead of an album later? What would have survived? What would have changed? I also look at something like “To Live Is to Die” and see how much it tries to hang on to the legacy of Cliff Burton. And I try to listen to any bass by pre-Metallica Jason Newsted, and imagine what this album would have been like if he were allowed to actually play. How did this happen? I imagine a weepy Lars Ulrich in the studio, crying “Cliff just died! Dammit, turn down the bass, Flemming!” and the producer just caving in to his demands. “I can’t cut out the 17th chorus-verse-repeat! Cliff died!” And of course, I try to imagine what this album would have been like with Cliff alive, how songs like “One” would have had even more intensity with his bass, and how lamer numbers like “Dyers Eve” would have been more aggressive with his musicwriting behind them.

Overall, this is a decent album. I’m biased because I listened to it so much in 1988 and 1989, so much that my tape of it is completely worn clean of any lettering on either side. But after about 1989, I pretty much completely forgot about this album for 15 years, which should also tell you it’s not a real contender. Maybe with shorter songs… maybe with better production… maybe with more bass… I don’t know. It’s still an interesting look back, and unfortunately, it’s also the last entry for the band before they became hard rock dandy boys.

Rating: 8