97. Metallica, "Master of Puppets"

 


I was never a big metal guy, and my only connection to Metallica was always pointing out Kirk Hammett's house at the peak of Divisadero when I was showing people around San Francisco.  If you've ever driven up that super steep hill, you've passed it:


Whew, I bet some wild shit went down in there.  (He sold it a few years back and now apparently lives in Sonoma and Hawaii.)  Anyway, given my real-estate-only interest in Metallica, I was very pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying this album.  I mean, I'm not gonna put it on every day or anything but I liked it!  

The songs were largely written in a garage in El Cerrito but the album was recorded in Copenhagen and it has a Nordic blackness you associate with the Danes.  The sound is, as you might expect, extremely guitar-forward, that absolutely crunching sound that you can feel in your chest.  But by this point Metallica had left behind the thrash scene they emerged from and although the guitars are relentless, they are so finely controlled that they feel like a weapon.

And that fits the themes of this album, which is all about control and mastery and the loss of that control (and, as James Hetfield has freely admitted, it's about drugs, a perfect lane to use to explore those themes).  Hetfield is not especially a subtle lyricist.  From the title track:

Needlework the way, never you betray
Life of death becoming clearer
Pain monopoly, ritual misery
Chop your breakfast on a mirror
Taste me, you will see
More is all you need
Dedicated to
How I'm killing you
Come crawling faster
Obey your master
Your life burns faster
Obey your master, master

Not exactly metaphorical, huh?  But guess what?  This songs absolutely kicks ass, and that it coming from someone who doesn't really love metal.  

If you know about Metallica, you know that this was bassist Cliff Burton's last album with the band before he was killed in a tour bus accident and his influence here is pretty clear.  The band never really got over his death, and they bullied successor bassist out of the band eventually.  But here Burton's anchoring of the sound is evident; it's plain how much they looked to him.

Of course, Metallica would go on to be one of the biggest bands in the world (and get all kinds of press for the truly dumbshit Napster fight they picked) and then make a movie about themselves being in therapy while recording an album, which will make you loathe Lars Ulrich if you didn't already.  But put all that shit out of your mind and just Beavis and Butthead out to this fucking slab of pure metal.

Is this album in my personal Top 500? Sure, why not.

Comments

  1. StephenSeptember 6, 2022 at 10:18 AM

    When I think of metal, I think of Damage Inc. Some people may think of some Sabbath tune, or Iron Maiden jam, but that song is Metal™ for me.

    ReplyDelete

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