Metallica

The intro is the kind you don't expect: a sweet, decisive guitar holding up two others wisely harmonized. It feels like being catapulted straight into a classic Sergio Leone western, but as we know, appearances often deceive; we're about to enter the most important chapter of the heavy metal saga, dominated by thrash and its greatest interpreters (and originators, beyond false legends and urban myths): Metallica. The adventure is called "Master Of Puppets", a biblical album for thrashers the world over and tangible proof that in music, as in everyday life, seemingly irreconcilable elements can coexist and find free expression: wild rage and naive melody give birth to legendary riffs, turning the guitars into patient schizophrenics in the hands of expert psychologists. It's Metallica's undisputed masterpiece, it's thrash's undisputed masterpiece.

Metallica arrive at their third outing in dazzling form, bolstered by a label like Elektra capable of raising their profile and broadening their audience, and with what fans consider their classic, and finest, lineup: Hetfield on vocals and guitar, Ulrich on drums, Hammett on lead guitar, and finally Burton, the legendary electric bassist of the Eighties, tragically killed in a road accident (during a Swedish tour) just a few months after the album was conceived. His death would prove an irreplaceable loss for both the band and their fans.

We're in the thick of the Eighties, music is unfolding in a confused fashion, embracing different genres and facets that very often don't align with one another; these are the years of synth-pop, of the resurgence of genres such as hard rock or psychedelia, while bands like Metallica or Megadeth explore more extreme frontiers, seeking in heavy metal a form of expression that could, through words and sounds, actively and aggressively denounce the flaws of the socio-political system; famous is the phrase and song from the previous album "Ride The Lightning": "Fight fire with fire".

After the already-mentioned intro, the album's lead single, "Battery", seems to bring back to purists' minds the opening riff of the previous work: the guitar passage is violent and stripped-down, and soon over it comes the uncontrolled ferocity of drummer Lars Ulrich, who unleashes powerful rolls that, like boulders, assault the listener... "only the brave!". Soon Hetfield's voice makes its first entrance and, although the riff is made up of simple slides over a basic E chord, his voice manages to deliver a convincing verse leading into a chorus that, building in intensity, conveys movement and force. The guitar exercise that opens the second part of the song is the essence of Metallica: a few notes steeped in vigor and melody, the perfect appetizer for Hammett's "first" solo, which shows the clear improvements from two years of lessons imparted to him, as legend has it, by the mythical Joe Satriani.

Just as you're about to catch your breath, bursts of guitar suddenly erupt again with no apparent respite: what many consider the finest lines ever uttered by thrash take hold of the scene; it's the moment for the title track, the summation of the movement that started a few years earlier in San Francisco's Bay Area: it's the moment for "Master Of Puppets". The chords penetrate and worm their way into your mind like an earworm, the riff presses forward relentlessly, the voice leaves no escape: "Ma-ster! Ma-ster!". As the script dictates, the fury gives way to tenderness: an arpeggio in pure Metallica style, while Hetfield is superb in stitching together a solo that's never trite and rich with pathos. The brief moment of reflection ends with the same arpeggio played in palm-muting with a thick, hard distortion that plunges the melody into an even rawer rage; there's still time for another Hammett guitar solo, a return to the song's main theme and a sardonic laugh from our puppet master.

The album's third track, "The Thing That Should Not Be", opens the first of two experimental exercises (the other passage being "Leper Messiah"), in which the band tries to express harshness and vigor not through speed of sound, but through a search for noise-driven fusions capable of conveying the "heavy" side of music.

Sonic schizophrenia forcefully returns to the fore in the obligatory ballad "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)": a track suspended between "Fade To Black" from the previous album, from which it absorbs the softness of execution, and "One" from the following work, whose devastating vehemence in the closing sequence it anticipates; while not Metallica's best ballad, it can rightly be considered their most complete (perhaps thrash's "perfect ballad").

At this point the album is about to draw to a close, but an instrumental track and a worthy conclusion would still be missing: here they are. The instrumental in question is "Orion", a colossus of prog-metal (something the band had actually already experimented with two years earlier on "The Call Of Ktulu"), where technique and sonic aesthetics manage, despite being expressed in massive doses, to be parts of the same whole, achieving synergies once considered almost unattainable; the album's final statement instead belongs to "Damage Inc.", a speed-metal-flavored track that harks back to the foursome's origins, reigniting the enthusiasm of "Kill 'Em All" nostalgists, while filtering the recipe through a new, mature awareness worthy of a band on its way to becoming legendary.

The last round of critical praise goes to track five of the record: "Disposable Heroes": a rhythmic tour de force like few others on record.

1986 can rightly be considered the crowning peak of thrash, thanks above all to this record, capable, like few others, of delivering powerful emotions. Guitar gems, powerful drum rolls and harmonic bass lines are masterfully wielded by the four horsemen who, like romantic warriors, move across bloody battlefields, never losing sight of the harmonic wisdom of the spirit.

Ride the wave of great music

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02/11/2006