I had high expectations going into …And Justice for All after Ride the Lightning. I’d only had one experience with Metallica previous to that on Master of Puppets, and album which most people know my opinion of. Still, Ride’s high points are stunning, so given that And Justice for All’s reputation as a focused piece de resistance driven by skill, I expected no less than nine monolithic works from it.

So now, here I sit, listening to the piercing opening guitar line of ‘Blackened,’ satisfied but still not whole-heartedly impressed. Let’s rewind. The year is 1988, and the fourpiece, now with a new bassist by the name of Jason Newsted who, it has been said many a time, is useless anyway on the disc, are riding a wave of critical and underground success because they don’t suck with their instruments like Motley Crue or G ‘n’ R. The problem is, in order to further advance their sound after three albums and still maintain the illusion of musical elitism, they resorted to atonal songs that go too long. Diehards say hereabouts that it’s ‘technical;’ and that may be true. But technical in no way equals ‘decent’ or ‘enjoyable’ – in fact, this album is a fine example of it going overboard. Metallica are so ultra-serious about their art on And Justice for All that you might well think that if any member had so much as smiled during its recording that the vibe would be ruined for days.

Another major, very realistic flaw with it is that the production really does blow. We’re not talking a typical raw thrash metal mix here; it is deliberately under polished to a grizzly, bone-dry exhaust of noise that makes it sound worse than it would have done played in the studio. Drummer Lars Ulrich’s barrage of percussion overwhelms us with a tinny, constant clickety-clack. The guitars sound like a vacuum, and chug monotonously through growling low-chords a lot of the time. As James Hetfield himself says on ‘Eye of the Beholder,’ ‘Moving back instead of forward seems to me absurd.’ Speaking of the old-timer himself, his voice is poorer than ever. Luckily he eventually developed his singing skills pretty much immediately after touring on it had finished but, like other pre-Black Album records, he shouts his way tonelessly through each dragging procession, sounding more bored than ever.

Either one of these stumbling points wouldn’t have brought Justice down to much on their own. It is the combination of both of them that ultimately invalidates and drives a stake through it.

It is yet saved, aside from its much-heralded virtuoso musicianship, by two good cuts. The first of them is ‘Blackened,’ a sneering, ferocious number with brilliant lyrics about the environment to boot (‘Bustering of Earth / Terminate its worth / Deadly nicotine / Kills what might have been’). Between the Buried & Mecover the song as a homage, in fact, and in all honesty, it leaves the original for dead. Much heavier and more powerful, wholesomely produced, and with more natural transitions, it’s everything this should be. Still, it makes its point, and is a triumphant feat, among the best in the Hetfield-Ulrich combo songbook.

The other is ‘One.’ I used to rather dislike it, thinking it to be a retread of ‘Fade to Black,’ their ballad prototype; and indeed, this seven-minute anti-war anthem does have a lot in common with the gloom of its predecessor, from the mellow introduction to the chunks of soloing at the end, courtesy of Kirk Hammett, but ‘One,’ the only subdued moment on And Justice for All, is too much a masterwork to be written off like that. The chiming, chilling riff proves the perfect atmosphere for the anti-war story, during which the vocal delivery sounds appropriately reflective for the first time. It is also a creative tour de force, modulating between minor and major keys, speeding up and… speeding up throughout, with a timing that is nothing less than expert.

It’s a shame they couldn’t take that formula and explore it a little more before the bottom fell out in the 㣾s, because they take the tried-and-true structure and apply it over mind-numbing lengths everywhere else. Vital energy is lacking from so much of the never-ending center (I’m talking about ‘The Shortest Straw,’ I’m talking about ‘The Frayed Ends of Sanity,’ and I’m talking about the nine-minute title track): the meat-and-potatoes guitar-drums blend hammers away without really driving so much as a moment of music (and again, it’s more because the production is crap than anything else), and the hook suffers terribly for laughably hyperliterate lyrics – although clever, they insist on reciting the woes of society and can’t even be heard much of the time through the dull racket. ‘Dyer’s Eve’ is no better; the band use the pretense of anger (which in turn gives Hetfield a chance to let loose with a buffoon roar) to thrash as fast as possible with a handful of power chords. I know what speed is, and this is just silly – they just don’t have what it takes to be Slayer. Only ‘Eye of the Beholder’ progresses through its various halls of sound in a way that shows some practical sense.

One last track also worth mention is ‘To Live Is to Die,’ the last instrumental the band released on a studio album, and often overshadowed by ‘The Call of Ktulu’ and ‘Orion,’ from Ride and Master, respectively. It’s Metallica’s ‘forgotten instrumental,’ so to speak, and sad to say, rightly so. After some wildly different Zeppelin-esque acoustic guitars, which act as bookeneds to the track, it falls into the same laborious chug-heavy motions that populates the whole album, and does this for no less than nine minutes forty-eight. What on earth is the purpose of this agonizing wankery if not to exasperate listeners? Have Metallica forgotten the value and individuality of a good instrumental?

…And Justice for All really is a fans-only album, so laden with some of the band’s most frustrating musical passages it’s as if it’s asking you - how much Metallica can you take? I’ve gotta say it’s more than I’m willing to swallow, but the satisfaction I have in that is that the album is dubbed with so many extra tweaks and nuances that it was very difficult to reproduce live. After this, the group wisely left prog-thrash to Voivod and decided to start anew. Of course, the fans of Justice will defend it to the death as their ‘last classic album,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean, despite the fact that the poor, vapid production ends up sapping all the presence out of it, claiming that it was more accomplished than 99% of the competition in 1988 (and even today)… Maybe so, but I’d rather listen to the ‘worst of Metallica’ five times over than be put through the whole of And Justice for All again.

1. Blackened
2. And Justice for All
3. Eye of the Beholder
4. One
5. The Shortest Straw
6. Harvester of Sorrow
7. The Frayed Ends of Sanity
8. To Live Is to Die
9. Dyer’s Eve

FURTHER READING

Ride the Lightning
Master of Puppets


Recommended: No