Music Review by Bill Rendall

Black Album - Metallica

Heavy metal has steadily increased in popularity. Initially it was dismissed and ignored by music critics and the music industry. Radio airplay was rare. But while other offshoots of rock came and went, heavy metal just kept on going.

Metallica established themselves in the eighties playing heavy metal. They also played ballads influenced by Ennio Morricone's movie scores for Spaghetti Westerns. They were determined to do things their way in defiance of the music trends. Metallica explored extended song formats with varied time signatures when such things were shunned as being an indulgent excess of the seventies.

The Black Album released in the early nineties brought the band wide commercial success. It includes the classic tracks 'Enter Sandman', 'The Unforgiven' and 'Nothing Else Matters.' It also includes a sabre rattling song for the Gulf War era in 'Don't Tread on Me.' The song intro includes a few bars of 'America' from West Side Story to let us know that we shouldn't take the jingoistic lyrics too literally.

The lyrics to 'The God that Failed' are probably the most personal that James Hetfield has written. His mother was a devout Christian Scientist but her faith didn't save her from dying of cancer. Traditional medicine may have.

'My Friend of Misery' features a rare co-writing credit for the bass player, Jason Newsted. The bass is given more space in this song than elsewhere on the album.

After attaining success under their own terms Metallica then started playing the media game and became more mainstream. I don't have any problem with the band mellowing with age but some of their fans accused them of selling out.

A good example of how mainstream Metallica became is the concert they did with the San Francisco Symphony at the end of nineties. Michael Kamen provided the orchestral arrangement. He previously provided the orchestration for 'Nothing Else Matters' from the Black Album. The mix of Symphony and band worked out surprisingly well. The concert includes most of the band's best songs and is a good summary of their career. It is available as a video.

Assimilation into mainstream rock was confirmed by Metallica's inclusion in the soundtrack of the mainstream movie Mission Impossible 2. Getting into movie soundtracks is not surprising considering their associations with the prolific movie soundtrack composers Morricone and Kamen.

Metallica's legal battle against MP3 music sites on the Internet has been well publicised. It is ironic to see former rebels siding with mainstream recording companies battling to retain their profits.

Metallica are among the best exponents of heavy metal in recent years. One of the criticisms often made of heavy metal is that it all sounds the same. Metallica has more variety in their music than most other metal bands. Every fan of heavy rock should have at least one Metallica album in their collection and the Black Album is their masterpiece.