03. Metallica Kill 'Em All 1983 (Megaforce)
Thrash Metal
The good, the bad and the downright hungry!
The Lowdown
There have been a number of albums so far on this year’s list that have featured what could be coined as thrash metal, but Metallica’s
Kill ‘Em All would make the biggest splash of all. Fellow thrash rivals Slayer had displayed a dark and insidious sound on their debut (see review) on an album that had been built from the b-movie rantings of Venom and like Venom they would go onto become not just a huge source of inspiration for fellow thrash acts, but also for extreme metal as a whole. There has also been albums from bands like Savatage. Raven and Exciter, bands that showed that they were heavy metal or speed metal bands first and treated the thrash angle to their sound as a secondary feature rather than their primary goal. In fact a number of songs or albums from bands would come under the thrash moniker at this time, but many of these bands would soon move into other territory, as they seemed to treat thrash as more of a passing fad instead of a completely new genre, but unlike all these previously mentioned bands San Francisco’s Metallica were something very different. Metallica completely embraced thrash metal as their core sound with little room for anything anything else and what made Metallica special, was that they had not only taken their cue from the likes of Motorhead and Venom for example, but had created a completely new template of what thrash metal should embrace as its own unique genre (in my 1984 intro I’ll be doing a thrash feature, so won’t being going into the main espects of the sound here) which was certainly a major decision by the band. This template though wasn’t overly original but its execution was, as the album’s template had already been laid down on Diamond Head's
Lightning to the Nations, the band most influential on them in the first place. The band’s initial line consisted of James Hetfield- rhythm/vocals, Dave Mustaine- guitar, Ron McGovney- bass and Lars Ulrich- drums, but both Dave Mustaine and Ron McCovney would soon fall by the wayside. Ron McCovney had constantly clashed with Mustaine and Ulrich, whereas Dave Mustaine’s ejection from the band would be one of the most infamous in the history of rock and the colourful account of these incidents can be found in about a zillion places on the net, literature and other media etc so I won’t go into it here, but it’s safe to say the he vowed revenge on Metallica and would go onto form Megadeth. His replacement was Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton came in for Ron McGovney and we now had one of the most revered line-ups to ever hit metal. The band’s chance came when they appeared on the Metal Blade
Metal Massacre comp (I’ll be doing a feature on these soon) and they would soon appear on numerous other demos, as well as opening for Saxon on their US tour of 1982. Their big chance finally came when with their Paul Curcio produced seminal debut on the small Megaforce Records label and as they say the rest was history. The album tracks fall into two types here, those recently written and those made up from re-worked earlier tracks by the band, and the latter includes tracks written when Dave Mustaine was in the band (the most contentious) and those written from previous excursions by the band members and the album starts with two such tracks in “Hit the Lights” and “The Four Horsemen”. “Hit the Lights” introduces us to the world of Metallica and plays like one of the band’s straightforward trademark thrash efforts, while “The Four Horseman” co-written with Dave Mustaine, kind of foreshadows the extended and technical direction that the band would soon take, and the song’s extended middle section plays like a technical metal gem. Much in the same vein as this is the epic “Jump into the Fire” another track co-written with Mustaine and the song’s masterful malevolent and catchy chorus make it pretty timeless. Two other similar tracks with Mustaine also appear on the album “Phantom Lord” another fav of mine and album closer “Metal Militia” and in my mind these tracks are consistently the strongest on the album. The rest of the album is made up of further extended classics like “No Remorse” amd the seminal “Seek & Destroy” the latter one of the band’s early legendary tracks and both display the impressive tempo changes of the band. There are no really poor tracks on the album, but there are a number of what I call linking tracks, meaning tracks that they're shorter and link in-between the best songs on the album and these include tracks like “Motorbreath” the bass player’s delight “(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth” and the best of the three in “Whiplash”. What makes
Kill 'Em All such a classic album is its combination of NWOBHM inspired catchy riffing, supreme power, malevolent aggression and blistering speed, which is all further enhanced by the technical playing of guitarists James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett who at times are right up there in the stratosphere, along with the aggressive drum beats of Lars Ulrich and the bass playing of the band’s most revered musician in Cliff Burton. Then added to all this is what I always think of as the trademark band sound and that is their stop-start-dynamics which effortlessly seep throughout most of the album and these stop-start-dynamics are pretty awe inspiring at times and second to none. Strangley enough for such a revered thrash album, James Hetfield actually described Metallica’s sound at this time to be ‘power metal’ and I also find it interesting that the band were able to sustain their complete sound over 51 minutes, which was long for an album of this type around this time.
James Hetfield- Rhythm/Vocals
Kirk Hammett- Guitar
Cliff Burton- Bass
Lars Ulrich- Drums
Production- Paul Curcio