Hear Me Out: Metallica’s ‘S&M’ is the greatest live album of all time
Live albums can always be a bit of a tricky beast for artists to pull off. Outside of having to play some songs as perfectly as possible, there also needs to be some level of spontaneity where the crowd can enjoy the album just as much as the people listening at home. The goal should be to give everyone a front-row seat to what you sound like in the flesh, and for a band that is as indebted to touring life as Metallica, they always had their fair share of surprises on their album releases.
Before the band was known as metal icons, they were the definition of road dogs. Half of their audience arrived through word of mouth and bought their records at the insistence of their friends, so they had a strong fanbase before they bothered to give anything to MTV.
And it’s not like they putting on some lavish show half the time. Most people knew that the whole appeal was to watch four metal maniacs play their asses off and leave everyone in shock by the time they were finished, but once people start hearing nonstop metal for over an hour, there comes a point where things start to get a little samey sounding. And while Load may not have been the answer most people were looking for, S&M was the best way for the thrash icons to shake up their sound.
As much as the album is a live facsimile of their greatest hits with an orchestra, there’s one extra member of Metallica on this record, and his name is Michael Kamen. Compared to what James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich could arrange for the band, Kamen’s attention to detail with the orchestral arrangements is some of the finest work to ever turn up on a Metallica record, including making a track like ‘The Call of Ktulu’ sound all the more menacing with those sweeping strings behind it.
Whereas other bands are able to feed off the energy of the crowd when making a live album, Metallica could have sounded equally as powerful with an empty house playing these songs. Compared to some of the messy production present on a handful of their albums, watching them turn ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ into a bass guitar clinic and giving ‘One’ the dramatic heft that it was always meant to have enhances the performance beyond what they could do in the studio.
And despite being part of the band for that short time onstage, Kamen’s way of co-writing with the band on the new songs is also fantastic. A song like ‘No Leaf Clover’ would have probably stayed locked in the Metallica vaults had Kamen not started everything off, but bringing in those descending lines towards the end of the song and opening everything up with the orchestra playing the guitar riff from the bridge is a stroke of genius.
Although some metal fans may have been pissed seeing one of their favourite bands taking the soft-rock route, that’s only a surface-level way of looking at it. Anyone would be pissed if they were used to the roaring guitars, but if the orchestra manages to make everything sound heavier in the mix, what’s there to really complain about?
Even if S&M marks the high point of the band’s musicality, the reason it should be considered the greatest live album of all time has more to do with what it did to their most famous tunes. Live albums now can easily be considered throwaways in an artist’s discography, but there are only a few instances where every single song on a live release is the superior version of what turned up on record.
