Metallica - Black Album was released 25 years ago today...

34 years since Kill em all was released the same amount of time between Pink Floyd's "Piper at the gates of dawn" and "The division bell "(+ a few years),can't see how anyone could compare any band over that amount of time to stay the same.(sorry for the Floyd reference if your not a fan,just blew my mind the amount of time that has passed)

 

Yeah,my Mom passed 3 years ago and was my last family member,ever since that a lot of 70s radio fodder I could ignore for decades now just brings back way too many sad thoughts,and sadly many songs i loved from the past now hurt to listen to.

 

Just got done watching A Year and a Half (again). Put me in the mood to spin my 4 LP boxset of the Black album this morning. Really have a new appreciate for the album now. Maybe it's because I have some new upgrades in my system since I last spun this beast of a box set? Sound is amazing. Arguably the best sounding metal album I have ever heard. Absolute classic. So much division on here regarding this album. Even if you don't like the record, I feel it still needs to be appreciated for what it did for heavy music and what it does for heavy music to this day. Hell, it still is outselling NEW releases by established metal bands, i.e. Megadeth!

With all the derision I see online towards this album, this album, if anything, is probably underrated in terms of its scope and what it has done for the metal music scene.

 

It's not underrated at all! It's their biggest selling album, it turned on a whole new population to Metal music &, as you said, continues to sell.
Because of that, the weakness of the quality of some the music & how it measures up to their previous efforts, it's overrated.

 

Good point. My point was that a lot of people seem to be unable to appreciate the album for what it is and for what it has done for the world and metal music.

 

Honestly, as far as I can see, as someone who bought the original run records in the '80s, what the Black album did was spurn on a new generation of mostly second rate music. I don't think any of the truly great Metal we saw after 1991 had anything or much to do with the slightly watered down, populist Metal that Metallica were writing. Pantera, Tool, Slayer ... really good metal despite the unfortunate trends either highlighted by or influenced by the Black Album. Of course, they had nothing to do with Rap or Nu Metal so it's not that bad!

 

I think you're underestimating how many fans they recruited to heavier music, though. The Black album influenced tons of bands, but probably even more new fans were recruited who eventually became metal fans and got into many more bands, essentially giving a major boost to the metal 'economy'.

 

No, I understand & admitted as much .... as a kid with long hair wearing Metallica shirts in school in the 1980s, & generally being considered an outcast by classmates & faculty ... to then see many of those people become Metallica fans in the 1990s was unbelievable. And not the big awesome we're all the same unbelievable but rather 'Oh wow, that intense thing that was intimidating to straight people is now catering to them' hard-to-believe. But yeah, from this came a more general Metal fan, Nickleback, etc etc.

 

I certainly see that point, too. With how they were skyrocketing in popularity even before the Black album, I think a lot of it and their evolution as a band was inevitable.

 

I guess I'll throw my two cents in: eh, it's okay. First i will point out, I was not around when this album or any of the others were released. So I am taking the Black Album strictly on its own merit.
I love Holier than Thou, The God that Failed, My Friend of Misery, Through the Never, Of Wopf and Men, I have a little bit of nostalgia for Enter Sandman. I really loathe the two ballads, Sad But True is pedestrian crap, and the rest is forgettable. This album sold a kajillion albums, and that matters I guess, but it really did little to benefit metal or music in general when all is said and done. All it did was present a neutered version of metal for posers to consume, and it gave us all the ****ty garbage post-grunge.

 

bump!

 

Well, I used to go to the Woodstock in Anaheim & watch Slayer. I used to catch Suicidal, Exodus, Megadeth...& yes, even Metallica at Jezebels + other small clubs...& once...I think 82 or 83 they were with Slayer at The Woodstock. I was there.

My buddy had the "No Life Til Leather" cassette & Metal Militia or US Metal?? Can't remember which one...but gave me one of them & recorded "No Life" from one cassette to another for me.

I was a rock & roll fan of many bands & became a punk...then a thrash appreciator, then fan from the very start. TBH, I saw Slayer so many times early - but was a way bigger fan of the Stones, Zep, Sabbath, Van Halen, Motley Crue, etc...

Slayer kicked in for good for me - as in - "I love this guys" not til after "South Of Heaven" really. Though I owned it all.

Kill em All, RTL, all the earliest Metallica - I dug it enough & am happy to say "I was there?"

Was I a poser? Don't really think so. But, others can judge. Yeah, I probably dug GNR quite a bit more than Metallica when they first hit.

All that said .....call me whatever you want: I FREAKING LOVE The Black Album!!! Big time. It wasn't the only way I'd entertain being a fan of Metallica, I already liked them, was very familiar with them.

I think it's cool that my (6 yrs younger) wife only became a fan of Metallica because of Sandman. Yeah, she's the full on poser or whatever. Not even that...she barely liked any hard rock - AC/DC Back In Black hits & Sweet Child & Aerosmith Pump stuff. But, I think that's just fine. She's a willing partner on our upcoming trip to see the Metallica boys in August. She wears Metallica shirts I've bought her. So...I'm thankful for the Black Album for this reason alone.

But damnit....I LOVE The Black Album!!! A bunch. It friggin rocks.

 

My Friend Of Misery is my favorite track on the album and I still love to listen to it. Heavy, dark, great.

 

Same here! My two main tracks are My Friend Of Misery and The God That Failed. Simply the best.

 

I have to say, I really enjoy the songs from this album, but I HATE how it is mixed/produced. The songs sold very sterile somehow, hollow, not very ear-pleasing on the album, missing a certain crunch, a certain looseness. The songs come off overproduced, or overly polished, on the record. Which sucks, because there's a lot of great songs. The production hasn't held up to the stand of time for me at all. I know James' voice isn't what it once was, but compare how organic this song sounds to the LP cut. And yes, I get that it would sound more organic since it's a live version, but my point is, it should've always sounded this loose and raw:

 

Broken is the promise,
Betrayal, betrayal.....

 

"Nothing Else Matters" is an all-time classic, great tune!

 

I love this album. Reading through the comments, it seems to be the people who dislike/hate it were trash heavy metal fans before this album.

I was coming from my fav bands : The Beatles / the Stones / The Who / The Kinks ,,, rock pop..... so for me this album was a great entry point to
heavier type music (up until that point I would say 'Helter Skelter (Beatles), Rip This Joint (the Stones) were about the heaviest songs in my
whole collection)... and yes all the songs have a melody but in my book that is a good thing. I am not into trash metal but I am glad that Metallica
made the black album as they have said themselves they had fairly over explored the 'trash metal' genre and felt there was nowhere to go...

Enter Sandman and The Unforgiven still gives me chills , Nothing Else Matters is a timeless classic. Of Wolf and man, Wherever I may Roam,
Sad But True and Through the never are all great. The other songs are at least good. I have no problems with the production.

I have this album stored next to 2 other great hard rock albums with a black cover - ACDCs Back In Black and Status Quo's Hello!

 

Appreciate everything you said there. My only feedback is that Metallica were the pioneers of THRASH metal, not ‘trash’. Keep on rocking!

 

You do know that the actual mixdown tape is 44.1 DAT, right? It allready met digital!

 

I've been rediscovering this album lately.

I would have been 11 or 12 when i first heard it, up to that point i was mainly in to classic rock and pop music of the late 80s/early 90s. My introduction to Metallica was my cousin playing 'One' for me at his house. I was blown away. Then someone must have given us (my brother and i) a dubbed cassette of the Black Album. We played it endlessly, it was the background music to many hours of Wolfenstein 3D and a crappy PC port of Street Fighter 2. I went backwards and discovered Ride, Masters and Justice... around the same time i was listening to Soundgarden, RATM, Pearl Jam, RHCP, Nirvana, Bodycount (yes, someone had put it on the same cassette as the Pearl Jam lol) which i thought of as all being 'Metal'.

Soon i discovered the Beatles and got in to more alternative stuff like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and Pavement; Metallica became kind of uncool to me (at the time), the final nail being Load (which in hindsight has some very nice songs on it).

Anyway, later i got back in to Metallica but really only listened to Ride, Masters and Justice.

Just in the last month i've been revisiting the Black Album and it's been hitting the spot BIG TIME. On first listen it sounded way too overproduced compared to how i remembered it (especially the vocals), but on subsequent listens with that out of the way i basically think it's perfect. Partly nostalgia i guess, but that ain't all it. There's a ton of nitpicks (vocals a bit too loud and reverby, i'd cut a couple of songs, the solos could be a tad more adventurous) but none of them are deal breakers.

For me it's a classic album, a part of my life, and has rejoined my physical collection with pride.

 

Good album, though I liked the one released previously.
One of the last released cds released in the long cardboard box, I think.

 

Yup, I remember watching the "Year and a half in the life of...." Video's back in the day, and didn't know what those long black boxes where. I only found out after I disovered ebay years later (we never had them in Australia).

 

My takeaway from this thread is that a lot of us were underage drinking beer to this album

Man, these anniversaries make me feel old. I remember blasting Master, Ride, Kill em All on my Sony sports Walkman before this album came out, and when I was blowing off the deck or mowing the weeds, just crank up my sports earbuds louder!

I was disappointed when this album came out. It seemed too soft and poppy compared to what I was used to. My friend got it before I did and my strongest memory I remember is listening to it at his house up in his attic hang out spot while playing Sonic the Hedgehog