I know I know.. redundancy, but come on, having 4 Metallica albums in my top 50 is more than Justified (
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#4: Metallica - …And Justice For All (1988)Genre: Thrash MetalIf you’ve read my other Metallica write-ups you’d see that I deliberately avoided saying that said album is the best, and if you know me well enough (which is pretty unlikely given the time I’ve been around on this forum) it’s clear …AJFA is in my eyes
the best of Metallica, ever. Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets, though terrific, I feel are not as unique. Justice has the pure anger with Hetfield’s vocals that doesn’t come across as fake or poorly written, which is how I feel about St. Anger. I don’t which of Kirk/James does exactly which guitar solos, but 99 out of 100 times it’s easy to hear, so I will say this: The solos that James does on this particular album are completely out of this world. The To Live Is to Die solo by him is one of the best things in Metallica history IMO, they’re all great though. I don’t think they realized at the time how big this was going to be, being the follow-up to the big Master of Puppets. But most of all, that a song like One became such an iconic song of theirs, yea it has the mellow verses and touching intro, but eventually it does return to the AJFA style. Regarding the bass on this album, I never thought there really was a very noticeable lack of bass, but I guess I can kinda see where people are coming from. At this point it looked like Metallica were going to have an instrumental song on every album, which would’ve been more than fine to me, there’s not a single instrumental by them that I find remotely bad. Anyway, I hope I don’t mess up the honorable mentions on this one, but it’s pretty much inevitable.
Favorite song: Blackened: Opening an album with Blackened? Hell yes. LOVE the drumming on this one, I can’t say that about a lot of Metallica songs, they usually don’t stand out as very unique. The chorus is fucking amazing. And finally, dat guitar solo.
Honorable mentions:To Live Is to Die: Call of Ktulu may be my favorite instrumental, but this one is very close. It does repeat itself a lot, but the repeating riff is killer so I don’t mind it. Like I said, James’ solo on this one is beautiful.
…And Justice For All: They just make it look so damn easy.. 10 minute song with a great buildup to the chorus, but most of all, sick instrumental break with some very groovy soloing.
One: Couldn’t pass on the famous power-ballad (if I can even call it that). I called this a weaker version of Fade to Black, but that’s only slightly, and competing against a song like Fade to Black is a lost cause. I like the intro and the chorus a lot, but the second part of the song is truly where it’s at.