Ride the Lightning

I was nominated to post 20 music albums in 20 days that I think are great. But I going to do a little review as to why I think their great. I'll start with day one. And it will be one of the bands that got the ball rolling in my descent into heavy metal lunacy: Metallica.

I remember hearing "Enter Sandman" and "Nothing Else Matters" along with the rest of the Black album and being impressed. Then my awesome friend lent me a copy of Ride the Lightning and my brain sort of collapsed in on itself from the sheer might of this album. The Black album is great, but RTL is faster, heavier, darker, more muscular, and contains way more musical finesse. Part of what makes this album so bloody intense is the obsession with, and fear, of death and dying; whether it's by nuclear annihilation in "Fight Fire with Fire", frozen to death in "Trapped Under Ice" , suicide in "Fade to Black", or fighting alongside your brothers in "For Whom the Bell Tolls". This fear of dying carried an atmosphere into the songs so thick you can breath it into your lungs. That atmosphere was not present in the Black Album. Hell, I don't think it was too prevalent in any of their other albums. Which is why I think this albums is special.

I still consider Ride the Lightning their best album. Many people argue that Master of Puppets or even And Justice for All is their best. But I think those albums are just refinements of what Metallica accomplished here. Master of Puppets is almost note for note just a copy of RTL with the instrumental switched to second to last place. And Justice for All is great, but the songs are too long for their own good and they kind of just insert "progressive" passages for their own sake. Make no mistake, Each of those aforementioned albums is a masterpiece in its own right. But it's a bigger musical leap to go from Kill Em All to RTL than it is to go from RTL to anything else they've done.

Everybody kind of makes fun of Metallica after the embarrassment that was their midlife crisis caught on tape in "Some Kind of Monster". But there was a time when they where one of the mightiest metal bands around. BUY OR DIE! Or just download it. Whatever.