Figured I'd move this into it's own topic... there's enough reformed and current metalheads around here that this should go at least as long as the beer thread.
Metal Up Your... kidding me?!?
Where do you start with this? Maybe at the beginning - Dave Mustaine is to be held responsible for only half of the, well, call a spade a spade... immature and just plain dorky lyrics on Kill 'Em All.
Mustaine penned "Victims falling under chains/You hear them crying dying pains/The fists of terrors breaking through/Now there's nothing you can do"... which ranks right down there with any 4 line verse ever scribbled on a junior high binder cover.
Hetfield found a sub-basement below the bottom of the barrel where he dredged out "No life till leather/We are gonna kick some ass tonight/We got the metal madness/When our fans start screaming" - metal machismo so tacky that it would make Ronnie James Dio blush.
Kill 'Em All (original title - Metal Up Your Ass) as a collaboration between Mustaine and Metallica gives them both a black eye.
Parts are greater than the whole?
Metallica came back with Ride the Lightning... songwriting is quite a bit better here, title track, Creeping Death, Fade to Black and especially For Whom the Bell Tolls are well written and don't sound like they're being shouted across a gymnasium with a leather studded wristband pumped in the air.
Megadeth releases "Killing is My Business... and Business is Good" (oh, good.. with an album title like that,
this won't be self-important wanking...) with such gems as "RATTLE HEAD/A DOSE OF METAL YOU NEED/TO BANG YOUR HEAD TIL YOU BLEED/IT'S TIME FOR SNAPPING SOME NECK/SLASHING, THRASHING TO MEGADETH"
Point Metallica - at least Fade to Black is a great song to kill yourself to. "Killing is..." is a good album to, I dunno, reproduce with your cousin to?!?
Come on, gimme something good...
Next Metallica album - Master of Puppets, I got this cassette when it came out, still some really child-like lyrics on it, but those songs make up for it with catchy riffs (Battery and Damage, Inc.) this is an album you can get a song stuck in your head and not feel like a complete moron. Well done, Metallica - don't stand too proud, though - if you were a race horse, you would have hit the glue factory long before you got the chance for this victory.
Megadeth - Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? Do they get a flat rate on words in their album names?!? Nothing to see here... video for title track got airplay (and like the song, it's a pseudo-political hand around an otherwise mindless metal wankfest)
Point Metallica. Master of Puppets was worth taking the dual cassette boombox off "high speed dubbing" for.
Late bloomers?
Metallica - And Justice For All... oh, hell... now they're going to try the political slant? Big step back from "Master"... the album is self-important and so technical even they can't groove to it. Not too bad, but like a discount laxative - it just doesn't move me. At least Newsted realizes the bass has more than one string (yeah, yeah... I just slammed "Saint Cliff" - he was a bar band hack)
Megadeth - So Far... So Good... So What! Okay, they've given you an opening, move out of your parents' basements, quit whining and give me something worth listening to. Great, you now rank as the only band to completely tear out what little political relevance "Anarchy in the UK" had. The lyric is "council tenancies", but that was a great place to be able to use the C-word, wasn't it, Dave? Hold still, you're not worth the bullet... lemme just tie a string around it and push it into your head so I can fish it out after.
Point? Me for having to deal with either of these two albums.
Everybody out of the gene pool...
That's it, Metallica... one more chance before I file you away with my jam shorts, white high-tops and BMX in the file of "things I've outgrown." The black album. Hey, this is pretty good... it's got its radio schlock (which rhymes with Bob Rock!) and the lyrics still aren't up there with a master wordsmith the calibre of Biafra or Gurewitz, but the songs are pretty good... though the B-side should have just been a single of "Nothing Else Matters" - a fair effort!
Megadeth - I'll skip Rust in Peace, and you should too. My reasons are: I never really listened to this album - my brother owned it, I ran it through the CD player once and never brought it out again.
On to Countdown to Extinction then... I admit, I sometimes get "Symphony of Destruction" stuck in my head... usually when really drunk. Dave's trying... he's really trying, it's the same angry young man BS, but this time, he's run it through a thesaurus... words like "donning", "deluge", "envelope" and "architecture" don't hide the fact it's still about vaguely evil beings, vaguely dark feelings and vaguely technical things.
Point - Metallica.
Then and now...
I have to stop this here... at this point, I had totally left behind boogita-boogita metal... I gave up feeling like a high-school guidance counsellor listening to whining about trivial things.
Metallica went on to release Choad, Re-Choad, Garage Inc., S&M, then fired Jason Newsted and replaced him with Rob Trujillo. In case you had better things to pay attention to than this man's forgettable career, he played in Suicidal Tendencies (one of the lineups that stunk on ice), for Ozzy Osbourne (after he was famous as a singer and before he was famous for being a sitcom buffoon) and Jerry Cantrell (who? The guy from Alice in Chains, his solo career... didn't know he had a solo career? Me neither, and I liked A.i.C.) Trujillo does hold a Guinness record - as the only hispanic man to be born with absolutely no rhythm. I'm told it's a "groove" and I wouldnt understand, but apparently groove music involves fractional notes and random measures.
Megadeth went on to release more albums I'm told. One contains covers of Alice Cooper's "No More Mr. Nice Guy" , the Sex Pistols' "Problems", and Black Sabbath's "Paranoid"... making many songwriters wish there were restraining orders on mechanical licenses.
So that's a reformed metalhead's take on these two.
Bren R.
