Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Megadeth/Metallica roolz, all else droolz...

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.

Man, I like my mainstream metal. And nothing you say is gonna change that. So you can just, like, shut up, man!

What, you expected an intelligent answer from a guy who listens to this stuff?

Actually, I got reacquainted with Metallica recently - I did all the visual work on a Workplace Health and Safety video about the death of a 19 year old electrician's assistant. He was electrocuted working on commercial ballasts (277 volt) without proper training, and working on live wiring (at the urgence of his employer). The guy was a big Metallica fan, and his parents had his tombstone etched with the "blind lady liberty" and text "...And Justice For All."

All the visuals were Metallica-themed... background slates looked very "Black Album" text and bottom-thirds took after other pushead/Metallica visuals, had to pour through all the Metallica stuff I could find (had to borrow most from bro, I only own Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets and the Black album on CD)

A really tough piece to work on, but it was used to push the Electricians' Licence Amendment Act to prevent this from happening again.

Google cache link to where the E.L.A.A. was read into the Hansard (the minutes of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba) - scroll down 2/3 of the document - the text "A Senseless Loss" is highlighted.

Bren R.

hey man, well at least Metallica have, like, vocabularies, man! Sanitarium, nadir... they pull out the big words.

Of course Metallica beats Megadeth hands down all the way!! Again, what happened to them after the Black Album? I can't believe the transformation!! They better give it up and retire, rather than releasing such crap just for the money.

If you really want to hear some great metal, especially Power and Melodic Death, I strongly suggest you start to have a look at the other side of the Atlantic. Great bands out there, much better than the "Nu metal" crap you often hear in the States. However, there are several US bands that I still enjoy and discovered not a lond time ago, such as Slough Feg, Twisted Tower Dire, Division (the last two from Virginia).

Well, I'm a completely useless Metallica fan, and here's what proves it.

I like Load.
I like ReLoad.
I like Garage, Inc.
S&M is my favorite album.

Yes, I even like St. Anger. Go fig.

I started listening to metal around 11 or 12 years old and now that I'm in my late 30's...........for some odd reason I haven't stopped. With that being said I consider myself versed in metal / hard rock music.

I have every CD of Metallica's and at one time was a fan. I have every Megadeth CD and actually prefer them over Metallica. Ride The Lighting is about the only thing you will catch me listening to now from Metallica and on occasion I will give Master Of Puppets a spin. I don't get where they are now and to be honest, there is better more creative music out there in this genre.

If you want to go down the direct comparison route, I think Megadeth's last CD is head and shoulders above Metallica's last attempt.

Plus I'm still holding a grudge against Metallica over that whole Napster thing!

im a fan of both metallica and megadeth, but i really cant stand most of the music on the radio today, as thyname mentioned i like alot of the more underground stuff, especially medolic death metal such as insomnium, trivium, dark tranquillity, and stuff like that...

I am a Metallica fan, but I must admit it's much easier to really get into the music if you get some adrenaline going. This means either headbanging for at least 15 seconds, singing along loudly in the car while lane diving, strutting around the living room with your devil's horns raised high, or having someone give you a swift kick in the gut.

Once you're in the mood, there's nothing like a nice Metallica listening session.

...............and it helps some when comes out! Not me of course as I'm way past that stuff. Drug of choice these day's is Crown Royal!

Load and Reload I can understand. Garage Inc is covers so I can understand that too. S&M is really a live album, so that's ok.

But St. Anger? Sorry Ken, but you can't get away with that one.

I have to admit, I've never listened to Metallica while stoned. But I think to enjoy St. Anger I'd need to try something much harder than pot.

If you watch the Metallica doc, it becomes abundantly clear to everyone but the band themself that they should hang it up. The just don't enjoy being in it; it's basically just a day job now. However, I suppose its worth it to take the stage and play to at least 70,000 screaming fans every night. Its gotta be quite the rush.
Also, I realize St. Anger is supposed to sound raw, but c'mon. I listen to music my friends recorded in their attic on a 4-track, so I'm not unfamiliar with "raw" sounding recordings, but I've never heard a snare that sounds like a garbage can lid suspended from a ceiling when its struck. Still, there's a few decent riffs on the record, but far more bad parts, and not one decent whole song.

I got to go with And Justice For All followed by Ride the Lightning. Sorry, I also like Load and Re-Load. This idea of "selling out" has always amazed me by some metal fans. Like Jason Newstead said about the topic....."Yea, we sell out every night". If your "band" finds a new fan base because of a certain album. How is that selling out? I am a little more old school maybe......Sabbath, Priest, Motorhead. I know some would say bands like Kiss, Ted Nugent, old Styx{way before Mr. Roboto} Grand Funk, Bad Company, The Who, Zeppelin and others maybe aren't "true" metal but great bands none the less.
Sorry to kind of get off topic, I won't even start with Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchett, Outlaws, Blackfoot, Marshall Tucker and Charlie Daniels {G}

The Garage Days $5.98 EP was my favorite from Metallica, and they were all cover songs, hmnn. I did like Kirk Hammets leads and solos on all the discs, I just liked his style. Too bad they are so boring and lame now. Too bad about Dimebag, I really like his style too.

In reply to:

---

I've never heard a snare that sounds like a garbage can lid suspended from a ceiling when its struck. Still, there's a few decent riffs on the record, but far more bad parts, and not one decent whole song.

---

A pretty accurate assessment.

Probably got a lot to do with how they put the thing together... They sort of cut and pasted from 4 hour jam sessions to make each 5 minute song. I thought that was pretty weird. On the other hand, the little bonus DVD that comes with St. Anger is much better. You know, when they're actually playing the song through from beginning to end.