The one Metallica album Lars Ulrich said was too “stiff”
The most important element of music always comes back to a sense of groove. Anyone can write melodies that they think will sound great on the radio, but if the whole thing doesn’t work when other people start playing along to it, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and find something that rolls off everyone’s instruments a lot better. While Metallica were never that kind of radio-ready band when they first started, they still knew that pieces of their sound needed to be felt in the bones before it met the stage.
From their very first record, James Hetfield was already writing the kind of songs that were insanely fun to play guitar. They might not have been the easiest thing in the world, but anyone could make a fortune if they were able to bottle the feeling you get when locking in with a drummer playing songs like ‘Seek and Destroy’ or ‘Disposable Heroes’ in a rehearsal space.
But after the band wrapped up their MAster of Puppets, writing songs that grooved wasn’t even part of their vocabulary. Cliff Burton was dead, and while he was responsible for a lot of their greatest harmonies on tracks like ‘Orion’ and ‘Creeping Death’, it was never going to be the same with Jason Newsted. He was a welcome addition, but there was something about And Justice For All that felt different.
Ignoring the fact that the band were petty enough to mix the bass too low in the mix, there’s something about the record that feels a little bit off. The guitars sound absolutely ripping, and there are a handful of pieces that lean more towards prog on tracks like ‘Blackened’ and ‘Eye of the Beholder’, but outside of ‘One’ and maybe ‘Dyers Eve’, the whole band often sound like they were performing a chore getting through some of the tunes.
And that’s not far from the truth, given what Lars Ulrich said about the difference between Justice and The Black Album, saying, “In the past, it had always been about nailing the perfect drum track, and it was just me and James in here and [he] would just play along so I could nail the perfect drum track. We used to punch drums in, so it became really kind of stiff. It was always about not fucking up.”
But listening to The Black Album by comparison, Ulrich understood the power of being slightly more subdued. Thrash metal was supposed to be about making some of the fastest riffs ever made, but looking at a song like ‘Sad But True’, Ulrich and Hetfield knew that it was a much better approach to have a song that was a lot more simple, taking the basic riff and slowing it way down so it sounded like one of Led Zeppelin’s long lost classics.
It’s one thing to switch up styles between albums, but Ulrich’s taste in drummers also changed throughout the years. He used to bow at the altar of people like Neil Peart and Ian Paice during his early days, but after working on ‘Enter Sandman’, he came to appreciate the power that came from hearing Phil Rudd laying down a beat or Charlie Watts playing off Keith Richards in The Rolling Stones.
Many fans may have felt that their songs got too mainstream, but And Justice For All was already the moment where they needed to move on. Because if they hadn’t been able to sanitise their sound for a little bit, there’s a good chance that metal wouldn’t have received its second wind once the 1990s kicked into gear.
