Black Friday #2: Ride The Lightning

January 15th, 2010 by Oswald Hobbes / Comment on this post

Metallica have been redefining heavy metal since 1984. That’s the year they dropped Ride The Lightning, and it’s the demarcation point between their past as pizza-faced thrash enthusiasts and their future as peerless masters of the form. Where their first record (Kill ‘Em All, a brutal classic in its own right) played by the rules established by the band’s NWOBHM heroes, Ride The Lightning creates its own parameters. It starts with some gently strummed classical guitar and ends in a flurry of riffs almost robotic in their tightness and precision; it declares, in no uncertain terms, that there’s a new sheriff in town. And he thinks deep thoughts.

People like to toss around the term “game changer” so much that it’s almost meaningless, but Ride The Lightning fits the bill. The baroque riffs that open “Fight Fire With Fire” would not have felt natural on Kill ‘Em All; had James Hetfield suggested this sort of gesture at any previous point in the band’s history, Lars Ulrich probably would’ve kicked his ass for even considering it an option. But this is a new Metallica, and that defiantly melodic passage announces the band’s new, more sophisticated phase of existence. The title track follows, and it’s a veritable monolith; the guitars squiggle and pummel in equal measure, effectively doubling the band’s arsenal. Speed is no longer the sole objective. This is a group that wants to write honest-to-blog songs, with real messages!

That vein continues with “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” by far the best thrash song ever named after an Ernest Hemmingway novel. Metallica have become obnoxiously humorless and hypocritical in their old age, and that trend began all the way back here with their second album. If separating classic albums from the negative connotations retroactively superimposed on them by their creators’ later shittiness was a course offered by any major university, though, Ride The Lighting would be the basis of a thousand smartasses’ theses, and understanding that is key to understanding any page of Metallica’s back catalog. The themes on early Metallica records are hamfisted and delivered with the subtlety of, um, Metallica album art, but the band really meant well at the time and I find it hard to fault them simply for being overly earnest. These were serious dudes, and their fixation on war, nuclear holocaust, and suicide is evidence not necessarily of pretentiousness but, rather, seriously good intentions gone somewhat wrong.

“Fade To Black,” one of Metallica’s signature songs, finds Hetfield attempting lyrical introspection but arriving at self-pity; luckily the track features the band’s most complex, sensitive, and flat-out beautiful arrangements to date. It’s kind of a downer to be sure, but the mood is rescued with the one-two punch of “Trapped Under Ice” and “Escape,” both featuring the kind of rapid, shiny riffs that made sixteen year-olds the world over wish Kirk Hammett would sneak into their rooms at night like some kind of demented tooth fairy and slip fiery leads under their pillows. That man, by the way, is in fine form throughout here, proving himself a more-than-adequate replacement for the still-recently booted Dave Mustaine. (Mustaine actually shares a writing credit on the title track, something that undoubtedly brings him more pleasure than Megadeth’s astronomical record sales in the late eighties.)

The album ends with another one-two punch, this time of a much more blood-chilling variety. “Creeping Death,” the album’s undisputed masterpiece, is a classic in every sense; the guitars churn and chop like an ocean of pure electricity breaking on cement shores. This description will only sound hyperbolic to non-believers and the uninitiated; everybody else knows exactly what I’m talking about. But, for the doubters and haters, consider this: Metallica can take the fucking bible and make it rock. Suck on that for a few minutes. Tastes good, doesn’t it? The “two” in this punch is “Call of the Ktulu,” the group’s first great instrumental, wherein the same bone-crushing riff is repeated ad nauseum until it creates its own wondrous logic and the only possible reaction is to soak up the awesomeness in a borderline-catatonic state, sort of wanting someone to wipe away the drool but not really because this is the best thrash-induced coma you’ve ever experienced and any disturbance would ruin the mood. And when I say “mood,” I mean “the violent death of all sentient thought.”

Metallica is the band parents warn their kids about because, let’s face it, once you hear these guys your parents can basically take a flying fuck. They don’t know shit. Metallica knows it all, and they begin explaining it here, the first of what I consider the holy trinity of thrash. Folks like to talk about Metallica, Anthrax, Megadeth, and Slayer like the four belong to the same wicked coven but that’s misleading; Metallica wrote the book of thrash with this, Master Of Puppets, and …And Justice For All, and those other three bands were just kind of trying to keep up. This is the real shit that you need if you want to be nuts; this is murder music, and you’re the poor sap getting killed. Metallica would make better records, but they’d never be this much fun. Ride The Lightning is music for anybody that inexplicably considers themselves a “metal intellectual;” such a thing does not exist, but for eight radical songs these guys almost make you wish that it did.

(Here at AssaultBLOG, we love heavy metal. Black Friday is our bi-weekly celebration of classics in the genre. Recommendations are welcome, so send crazy shit to oswald@assultinc.com.)