RIDE THE LIGHTNING

Those in my circles always placed "Ride the Lightning" as above the debut album and equal in stature to "Master of Puppets" but nowadays I find both conclusions wrong. The debut album just smokes this often boring, contrived beast, and Master would be a quite large improvement over it. Metallica clearly had the ambition here to move forward in their quest for domination, and one can hear the supposed improvements in production as well as the attempts to branch out with more complex songwriting. But the loss of the debut's grit and energy are not replaced by anything that holds my attention these days. This would not be the case on Master which still strikes me as a monster fun metal album. Here I can point to only "Fight Fire with Fire" and "Creeping Death" as highlights that kick my ass. The former has a cool acoustic opening before tearing into a nice thrashy mess and Creeping has an epic feel to it, nice development and punch. But other like "Bell Tolls" and "Ktulu" are lumbering and tired. Even the title track which starts out pretty good just drags on and on with a Hammett solo that is all show and little else. With regard to "Escape" I can only say I've heard better tracks from some of the old guys I used to hang out with, wake me when it's over James. The artwork here also fails miserably, as cheesy as it gets. Metallica really do not excite me too much so it's probably best to disregard my brief opinion piece here, but my recommendation would be to acquire "Kill 'Em All" or "Master of Puppets" for the best Metallica. Then of course Burton was sadly lost and while the band would find great commercial success, it connected even less with me post-Cliff. I'd like to give this three stars for Fire and Creeping but when I look at the other six tracks I can't call it a "good" album.

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