…And Justice For All - 1988
Tracklisting: 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. Dyers Eve.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6jZ1z25PyF4Yd3kHxt9rl1?si=qhuDB44sS0yHHNKo_4jfJA…And so, Metallica went back on the road with the European leg of the Monsters of Rock festival, which lasted until the end of August of 1987. From there, the band finally found time to take a short break. In all the chaos that had been the last few years, they had sure earned one. Metallica changed record label onto Phonogram Records, now managed by Peter Mensch, for a tidy £1,000,000.
In January of 1988, Metallica found themselves at One on One Studios in LA with a producer named Mike Clink. They had wanted to use Fleming Rasmussen again, but he had proven unavailable for their planned start date of January 1st. Clink had attracted Metallica’s attention through producing
Appetite For Destruction the previous year. However, plans quickly deteriorated. Rasmussen became available 3 weeks into the project, and of course Metallica wanted him after his success on
Ride and
Master. Rasmussen listened to Clink’s rough mixes on his flight to Los Angeles and when he arrived at the studio, Clink was promptly fired. Clink is credited with engineering drums on
Harvester of Sorrow and
The Shortest Straw, as well as production on the two cover songs that would be released as B-Sides on the singles from this era.
The band recorded the songs in a live room, recording each instrument separately. Each song was made up of three reels of tape; one for drums, one for bass and guitars and one for any additional tracks, including the vocals. James wrote his parts during the recording sessions, with a few lyrics being unfinished as vocal tracking started. Speaking of the vocals, James opted to go with less of a singing approach and more “yelling in tune”, wanting to have a “hard vibe”. Jason, on the other hand, recorded alone with only the assistant producer present. He felt that the process with Metallica was odd. Of course, we all know how that one turned out.
Getting the elephant out of the room, the mix on
Justice is very sterile. As the mix wasn’t under Rasmussen’s control, but rather given to Steve Thompson and Steve Barbiero, the usual Metallica production wasn’t there. Instead, the drum tracks only used the close mics without any room mics, leading to a very “clicky” sound. Then, of course, there’s the bass… or I guess, there
ISN’T the bass. At the request of Hetfield and Ulrich, the bass was practically muted. Upon hearing the initial mixes of the album, Thompson and Barbiero were told “take the mix down to where you can barely hear it anymore, and then drop it another 3 dB”. Very few people have ever heard Jason’s recorded basslines from the album, though Rasmussen has gine on record as saying that they were incredible.
With recording bing finished in May 1st, 1988, Metallica went on tour once more with the Monsters of Rock tour of 1988, which took place between May 27th and July 30th. The tour featured one new song,
Harvester of Sorrow. It was released as the first single from the album in August 28th, roughly a week before the album was officially released on September 7th.
So, we know that it sounds a bit wonky production wise, but how does
…And Justice For All itself sound? Let’s go through it.
Starting on one of the cooler tricks in the production here,
Blackened opens with a reversed guitar harmony before laying it on thick with the aggression. You can hear the original here if you’re interested (
https://youtu.be/YJ1vCidA53c ). The main riff here is exceptional, one of my favourite mains from the album actually. Blackened is a song expressing the concerns about the state of the environment. It’s heavy as hell and almost reads as a lyric of nuclear war, it really could be taken either way. This follows in the footsteps of many of the songs from
Master of Puppets where the bridge is one of the best sections of the song. The single word and echo really hits hard! After the bridge, we get a great melody that builds into a harmony that builds into the start of the solo, it’s actually a really great evolving section. The solo is great, I love how we get a full reset back into the main body of the song. I also really like the way that the main riff gets changed in it’s timing right before the final verse. I can’t tell if it’s James and Kirk changing it up or if it’s Lars’ drumming that changes, but it’s really cool all the same. The ending of the song is a little bit abrupt though. All up, this is an amazing song. I just don’t know if it’s this or
Battery that I find to be the more perfect album opener. And it certainly deserved to be the start of Jason’s first album with the band. This was his first (of three total, but we’ll get there) songwriting credits with the band and was actually the song that was written for what would turn into
Garage Days Re-Revisited (told you it’d come up later!)
…And Justice For All has to be my favourite intro on the album. Starting so peaceful and tranquil, then building into the aggression, but with moments of harmony within? It’s HUGE! However, straight off the bat, we gotta talk about the fact that this one seems to be a bit clipped in the production stages. You can really hear it throughout various stages of the whole song and it’s rather overpowering. The lyrics here are about political corruption and money basically turning the tides of justice legally. It’s also a song that, while being close to ten minutes long, paces itself very well and doesn’t drag too much anywhere. While I’m not a huge fan of the proper solo section on this one, I love the melodic lead just before it and the re-intro that forms the bridge of the song is such a cool section. It feels like they took one of my favourite tricks from
Battery and really expanded upon it here. The song ends up with a great playoff out of the final chorus, I especially like the way the last line of the chorus is reincorporated as part of the outro, just to drive the point home. If it wasn’t for the production errors, I feel like this would be one of my absolute favourites in the Metallica catalog. These days though, I find it hard to really go back and listen to the album version when there are a handful of great live performances I can turn to instead.
The next song is one that Lars absolutely hates,
Eye of the Beholder. Despite that, it was actually released as the second single at the end of October 1988. We open on an extended fade-in, before that rhythm evolves into our main riff. The lyrics here are about freedom of speech and civil liberties seeming to be snuffed out a little at the time. It seems rather poignant with the major events in America in the last few years. The problem is, apart from the chorus with it’s freedom breakups, this song is actually a little bit of a filler track to me. It’s certainly not the strongest thing here, it’s probably the weakest actually. I like the play around with the main riff that starts the instrumental section, but even then it’s a bit of a hit and a miss. The harmony is cool though.
What failings
Eye of the Beholder had are soon swept under the rug though. As had become tradition over the last few albums and wouldn’t be ending anytime soon (actually, I think there’s only been 3 albums to date that have broken this tradition to date), the 4th track is our ballad for the album. This one starts a little differently though, with the sounds of machine gun fire and explosions before the guitars start up. A brief introduction to one of two main riffs leads into a lead break, then evolves to get the drums in there before a beautiful harmony leads into the first verse. This is
One, one of the most important songs in Metallica’s arsenal. This is the first song they ever did a music video for, which again led to the feeling that Metallica were starting to become sell outs. Still, this song is an anthem for all the right reasons. This song really is everything they were up to this point personified in one song. The lyrics are heavily based around the book “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo, in which a young American soldier is hit by an artillery shell in the First World War and subsequently winds up in hospital as a quadruple amputee, but also missing his ears, eyes, mouth and nose. He’s conscious through it all as well, so he continuously prays for death. The music video contains many clips from the film, which meant that Metallica had to keep paying licensing and royalty fees. In the end, they straight up bought the rights to the film and now DVD copies of the movie actually have the
One music video as a bonus feature. I read somewhere that the back half of the song, where it goes totally heavy, is based on the cycling rate of an AK-47. It’s such a killer song and if you don’t know it, you’ve been doing Metallica wrong. Kirk and Lars are at their best here, for sure. One was released as the third and final single from Justice in January of 89 and remains one of Metallica’s most played songs live to this day.
The current standings for top 5 most played Metallica songs live (since we’ve now covered them all) are
Master of Puppets at 1722,
Creeping Death at 1601,
Seek and Destroy at 1575,
For Whom The Bell Tolls at 1571 and
One at 1566. I wonder how those standings will look after the M72 tour…
Anyway, back to
…And Justice For All. Up next is
The Shortest Straw. This is a really cool song all about blacklisting and discrimination. This is actually the song that Lars used in his anecdote about how the songwriting went for this album. “These were our ‘CNN years’. I’d read something about blacklisting, we’d get a title, ‘
The Shortest Straw’, and a song would come out of that”. And what a song it was. This song has another great intro, but it’s the main riff that I really love on this one. There’s a lot going on and it all makes for a pretty great song. I love James’ vocal line, I love the use of double bass to bring out the end of the verse. And then we get that transition into the chorus! Man, that’s a great hook. I also really love the duelling lines that almost act as a secondary chorus of their own. The build into the first solo is another fantastic instrumental section. The thing is, it feels like they weren’t all that big on bridges on this album, where
Master of Puppets had been dominated by amazing ones. Here, we just get that “pulled for you” section between the two solos.
This song is one that didn’t get played live all that often, though it did get included in the list for Guitar Hero: Metallica. During the motion capture, Lars had to relearn the intro and it’s odd timings again which led to this iconic video. Watch it for the laughs, man. (
https://youtu.be/SCJajVY_ucI )
Up next, our first single.
Harvester of Sorrow is the second shortest song on the album but also the slowest in tempo. Nonetheless though, it’s a great song. The main riff is super heavy, the subject matter of a man who suffered childhood abuse and ends up falling into madness and killing his own family. It’s exceptionally dark and I feel that a faster pace would not have done this song it’s due justice (pun intended!). It’s also a really well paced song, with our intro serving to really set up the main riff perfectly well. This was the first song off of the album I caught live and I’ve actually seen it twice. The instrumental section following the solo was an absolute blast to see. I like the solo on this one, though it seems Kirk has never actually played it straight live.
Harvester is another one of my lower ranked songs for the album, but all up, it’s pretty decent. It’s a song that I think benefits from being performed live, which we’ll talk about a few times next year.
And now we reach the trilogy of deep cuts. Starting it off,
The Frayed Ends of Sanity. This song is pretty straight up about paranoia and schizophrenia. The lyrics here do hold an interesting piece though, as it references two future songs,
The Struggle Within from the
Black Album and “this nameless feeling” which isn’t too far removed from
The Unnamed Feeling from
St. Anger. This one is notorious for being the song Metallica held off from playing live for the longest time. James said it was “because he’d get bored playing it” but let’s be honest, these riffs are absolute bangers. There’s a lot of different changes and odd structures to the instrumental section here. This song is really dominated by the riffs more than the lyrics. And I think that’s for a good reason, as the instrumental section really is shown off as the true star of the show here. Of course, we can’t overlook the “all we own, we owe” chant that was teased for many years over many shows. It’s actually a really great song. Maybe a little overhyped when it was finally played live, but it’s a great song. A shout out to all the ticket holders for Helsinki on the Metallica By Request tour in 2014 for finally getting this one over the line and into the set.
Up next is another nearly ten minute song and the final entry in a trilogy of epic instrumentals over the first four albums,
To Live Is To Die. Opening with a beautiful classical guitar intro before the heavy riffing kicks in feels symbolic of living the dream before the harsh reality kicks in. This song is a tribute to Cliff Burton, who is credited as one of the songwriters here. Some of the riffs here are taken from jams they had with Mustaine in the band and the middle section, the heartbreaker that it is, was reportedly based on a riff that was included in Cliff’s final bass solo. I love the sound of the melodic breakdown here. The effects make it sound like it could be included in a news reel and ending it off with that amazing solo by James (my second favourite solo in the entire album) is powerful stuff.
Though this song is classed an instrumental, there is a spoken word passage. “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world. These are the pale deaths which men miscall their lives. All this, I cannot bear to witness any longer. Cannot the kingdom of salvation take me home?” The first line can be found in the movie Excalibur, the second can be found in the book Lord Foul’s Bane, but the second half was written entirely by Cliff.
To Live is to Die ends on the acoustic piece once more, though it is abruptly cut off as
Dyers Eve begins, once again showing off the harsh reality of Cliff’s life being brought to an abrupt end. We are now into the final and shortest track of the album though, one that screams aggression from the moment it starts. This is lyrically a rant from James to his parents, who were Christian Scientists by faith and chose to “protect” their son from the outside world, which kinda just broke his world when he was finally out on his own, not at all helped by his father leaving and his mother dying at a young age. This song is pretty much the pinnacle of thrash for Metallica though. The verses are absolutely soaked in double bass and the downpicking patterns that James and Kirk are putting out at this tempo are pretty much the direct cause of RSI for many guitarists. This song has my absolute favourite solo from
…And Justice For All, once again employing the use of repeated motifs that I loved so much about the solo from
Disposable Heroes. This is all about aggression and you can feel the unkempt anger in James’ words all throughout.
And that’s
…And Justice For All. It’s easily deserving of a place in the upper echelons of any Metallica fans album rankings. Despite all the production errors that didn’t give Jason the chance to make a proper impact on his debut album and kinda overpowered the song in spots, this is nothing shy of fantastic. There are a lot of progressive elements here and a ton of really long songs that you can feel are lashing the limits of the groundwork that their first three albums had given them, I think this is very much the upper limits of what they could do with this particular style. I give it a 9, because even with all of these issues, it’s hard to hold back on how great it truly is.
Metallica supported
…And Justice For All with a huge tour that lasted from September 11th 1988 until October 8th 1989. This included their first visit to Australia, where they were one of the very first major headlining bands to ever reach Adelaide. It was their first all headlining tour ever.
Infancy, Progression, Ascension,
Domination.
And that’s it for the 80s, much as this is the last writeup for 2022. I’ll see you all next week for Metallica’s big entry into the 1990’s.
Topic: Deadeye Deep Dives: Metallica (Chapter 13: 72 Seasons) (Read 13806 times)
