10 Things Only Old School Heavy Metal Fans Will Understand
4. Metallica Lost It In The Late 80s
Metallica emerged out of Los Angeles in the early 1980s with a fresh, energetic sound that excited Heavy Metal fans. Their first four albums - Kill 'Em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets (still considered their magnum opus) and ...And Justice for All - helped define Thrash Metal and shocked a world that was still listening to Winger, Warrant, and Whitesnake. In 1991, the band released their self-titled album, and it became their biggest hit ever - it made Metallica into megastars and has gone onto to sell over 30 million copies worldwide.
Unfortunately, it's not very good.
That's not to say it doesn't have good songs - Enter Sandman and Sad But True are masterpieces, and have become two of the band's staples. The problem is that the album - the first produced by the controversial Bob Rock - lacks the energy of the ones that came before it. The songs are slower and more melodic, and the thrash style is all but gone. To the world it was a great album, but to hardcore fans of the band it was missing something very important.
Metallica continued to work with Rock for more than a decade, with subsequent albums drawing more and more criticism. The band ditched Rock before 2008's Death Magnetic, and the result was an enjoyable, if still somewhat tranquilized, return to form.