Metallica

Generally considered Metallica's finest hour, Master of Puppets is just about the most exciting metal album to come out of the 1980s. From the ominous acoustic guitars that open "Battery" through the next seven maze-like opuses of pure intensity, Master of Puppets is the kind of record you have to play loud enough to make air melt.

On Master of Puppets' "Damage, Inc.," James Hetfield lays out Metallica's business plan: "Go
against the grain until the end," he bellows, gleefully adding, "Life ain't for you/And we're
the cure." The target of the band's bottomless rage in the mid-Eighties was Van Halen's
party-rock spawn. With their third album, the self-anointed "anti-Motley Crue" did their
worst to carpet-bomb L.A.'s Sunset Strip while broadening the thrash-metal pale... More >

I feel at a generational disadvantage with this music not because my weary bones can't take its power and speed but because I was born too soon to have my dendrites rerouted by progressive radio. This band's momentum can be pretty impressive, and as with a lot of fast metal (as well as some sludge) they seem to have acceptable political motivations--antiwar, anticonformity, even anticoke, fine. But the revolutionary heroes I envisage aren't male chauvinists too inexperienced to know better; they don't have hair like Samson and pecs like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's the image Metallica calls up, and I'm no more likely to invoke their strength of my own free will than I am The 1812 Overture's. (Grade - B-)