...And Justice For All: 20 Years Later

what you need to really enjoy this record is rails of super-caustic bathtub crank

I think the defenders of this album are listening through, err, rose tinted glasses. Listen now, as an adult, in 2008 and tell me what's good about it. I thought I loved it too until yesterday when I heard it for the first time in fifteen years.

Come on, at least "One" is a classic

Great record, though no RTL.

I've owned three copies of it, just listened to it today and still love it. The one Metallica album I always return to. Couldn't care less about clicky drums or a lack of bass. They can repeat the same riffs for as long as they want too.

I think the defenders of this album are listening through, err, rose tinted glasses.

Not that there isn't a little of this.

I really hate "Blackened" in Rock Band. Ridiculously hard to play, and so much of it is musically worthless bullshit.

also the slow section in the title song is one of those "yep, we ran of ideas here" moments

This album still holds up. Never was a big fan of "Eye of the Beholder", but that's a minor gripe. Great record, "Harvester of Sorrow" ranking as one of my all-time Metallica faves.

I love this album. The only weak tracks are "Eye Of The Beholder" (which I owned on cassingle before the album came out) and "To Live Is To Die." The 1-2-3 of "The Shortest Straw," "Harvester Of Sorrow," and "Frayed Ends Of Sanity" kicks so much ass. And I love the sound - a gleaming steel skeleton. They could have stuck with this exact sound for the whole 1990s and I would have been unbelievably happy.

the songs are a bit turgid and overlong in spots, but it's still pretty good.

the other thing about this album is that for me anyway it is forever tethered to the hesher pride everybody felt when Metallica showed up at the Grammys and completely shredded everything in sight.

for reference:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=owm2XdwuVo4

this is my favorite metallica album

i listened to it 1000000x on my walkman with shitty headphones, so the bass thing wasn't really an issue. who listens to thrash metal for bass, anyway?

what's an early metallica album where you can hear the fucking bass?

the only good songs are all of them.

I'm still mad about that Jethro Tull thing. -xp

metallica-related things i have been angry about:

1. st. anger
2. endless videos with creepy old men (that aren't metallica)
3. the black album
4. the jethro tull thing
5. haircuts

wait, 1 could be every album since the black album peaking with st. anger.

I used to think this is great, but it's hard to slog through now, whereas I can listen to RTL 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Compared to what came after, though, it's an absolute masterpiece.

I'm still mad about that Jethro Tull thing.

one of my most burned-in musical memories - when I was a kid, I dug Jethro Tull (I'm pretty sure a 25-cent copy of Benefit was the first record I ever bought with my own money), but I watched them take their Grammy and went "oh bullshit and you all know it"

The only good tune is "To Live Is To Die."

Wrong at the first hurdle. To Live is To Die exemplifies the flaws of this (generallygreat) album.

Also, the lyrics on here make St Anger sound like Highway 61

Their lyrics have always been shit. The vocal style in the earlier albums make their shitiness quite unobtrusive though.

I watched the Classic Album show on the Black Album recently. Bob Rock was just amazed that Hetfield wrote the melody to the lyrics first and then the lyrics. All the Metallica demos just have Jamez going "WHAAAA-NEEEEE-NEEEEE-NAAAA".

"I'm not a poet like Phil Lynott," said Hetfield in the special.

Shit, forget Lynott, he's not even Mustaine. But lyrics aren't what I'm looking for when I throw on Metallica.

Yeah, closest I've gotten to caring about Metallica lyrics (for better or worse) is liking the part where he goes "...damageincorporated".

Creeping Death is kind of cool

don't fuck with razorback

fuck it all and fucking no regrets

the other thing about this album is that for me anyway it is forever tethered to the hesher pride everybody felt when Metallica showed up at the Grammys and completely shredded everything in sight.

So true.

are they doing a vinyl reissue of this? i wonder if the remaster and being on vinyl would give it a little more bottom?

i think some dude recorded the bass parts himself and released the bass-enhanced version of the album. i can't remember what he called it... i think it might have mentioned cliff. perhaps "and justice for cliff" or something.

yeah i think thats right

AND JASON FOR ALL! YOU PEOPLE, SHEESH!

everybody who says To Live is To Die isn't good probably drinks their own pee.

No comparison to Call of Ktulu, no, but it has that really nice quiet passage in the middle....

Also the way the heavy part comes in all off time and ominous after the wimpy acoutsic intro. It's badass. Plus I think Cliff wrote the 'lyrics'

The love for "Frayed Ends of Sanity" here is baffling - come on guys. That Wizard of Oz shit at the beginning?

i was thinking of making a poll of songs that use that wizard of oz shit (prince, mos def, etc.).

listen to the riff underneath the solo in "frayed ends of sanity", that shit is awesome.

I'd love to see that poll! (Can't forget "Jungle Love".)

Me, I really could've done without "Harvester of Sorrow". But then we'd have had an 8-song album with a configuration/track sequence a little too similar to a watered-down Master of Puppets, which itself was a kinda rehash of Ride the Lightning. Diminishing returns, etc.

AND JASON FOR ALL! YOU PEOPLE, SHEESH!

i didn't name it!

everybody who says To Live is To Die isn't good probably drinks their own pee.

the former prime minister of india Morarji Desai drank his own urine for decades until his death at the age of 99. I'm not sure how he felt about that song however.

All this I cannot bear to witness.

AND JASON FOR ALL! YOU PEOPLE, SHEESH!

i just found it. it's called and justice for jason. it doesn't sound all that great. the dude who made it really overdid the bass, imho

didn't Cliff steal the 'lyrics' from To Live is to Die from some sci fi movie or something

It was a speech by Merlin from Excalibur!

The only good tune is "To Live Is To Die."

My god this is wrong.

Just listening to the intro to the title track and thinking it's one of the prettiest and saddest acoustic guitar passages I know.

this album is grate! Legend of Zelda metal!!!

production's a little bit eh but this album forever imo \m/ O_O \m/

I am my own best friend

that's a great record too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnatnzxxtFE

Some guy has done his own re-mix (upping Jason's bass) using the Rockband game....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAvwod7BBK0

I can't accept this album with bass, it feels like less of a cold, steel sculpture.

I played bass on "One" in my band in high-school, I had to learn the basslines from a transcription book because I couldn't hear them even reading the sheet music. I wonder now if they just made the basslines up (or maybe studied Jason's hands in concert).

they had a cow interpret the frequencies

The only place on the album it's audible to me is the intro to "Eye of the Beholder".

To live is to jason

I hit the final stage of Acceptance with the bass on this album long ago.

It is what it is, and at this point, it's like complaining about the lack of bass on "When Doves Cry".

what's weird about this album for me specifically is that when I was a kid I had a copied cassette version of this album, which was copied from another copied cassette, so I always thought it sounded kind of weird and not very dynamic, but always assumed that's what happened when you listened to a cassette that was a copy of a copy. Then 10 years later as an adult, I randomly buy this album on CD when stumbling upon it in a used CD store and I put it on thinking I would finally hear this album the way it's supposed to sound and it sounds basically the same as my cassette copy.

Still my most listened to Metallica album by far, that shitty cassette copy got a lot of plays.

Today my mind was blown by this fact from a nerdy audio engineering video - the drums on Justice and on the black album were recorded in the same room.

(different place in the room, different engineers of course)

Listening to this album again now. It rules.

So so great. The Black Album otoh is one of those albums I keep trying to enjoy but can’t get into (or even get all the way through).

Yeah, the Black Album...I can get through the first 3 tracks, track 5, and track 7. But why would I?

The Black album is one of those albums where whenever I hear one of the songs in isolation I think it's pretty good, but all the songs together on an album doesn't work

It was my gateway drug. Songs I can still stand to hear:

Sad but True
Holier than Thou
Through the Never
The God That Failed
The Struggle Within

Through the Never is a sweet deep cut

Struggle Within could have fit on Justice (if it were four minutes longer with a long bridge in a different tempo, obviously).

xpost Through the Never is the only one I really like to listen to anymore other than maybe Unforgiven, the others barely scan as songs anymore as they're so omnipresent.

oh I guess I love "Holier Than Thou", even if it occasionally feels like Metallica by way of GNR.

tell ya though, the album really overrelies on its polish, like...a lot of the songs sound terrible live. I went to see Metallica at Rockville where they did two sets on two nights and one night, it was just The Black Album back to front and it was so boring I left early.

and of course missed "Damage Inc" in the encore. dammit.

Not to keep sullying the AJFA thread talking about the black album, but the way they play the chorus of Sad But True live is so funny to me. Instead of playing "you know it's" as a triplet they do it as 8th notes, so it turns it into this weird bar of 9/8 (plus another 2 beats). It's so dumb-smart (or smart-dumb), when you're used to the album version it sounds like time slowing down. Very indicative of their modular, "whatever works" approach to meter that makes them them.

things I love about AJFA
- the guitar sound
- the density of riffs
- the beautiful melodies
- the weird Bruegel-esque band portrait in the liner notes
- two songs over 9 minutes long

I guess it’s more of an ukiyo-e thing, the one with the gavel

Jordan I've noticed that weird alteration to Sad But True, it just absolutely fucks with my brain because it sounds wrong.

I feel like James also made a minor alteration in the fingering for "Call of Ktulu" live in all performances of the song since like 1999, it sounds similar enough that most don't notice but involves much less frequent finger movements.

I tried to seek out other thrash like AJFA during the pandemic, and largely arrived at Evile, mid-period Heathen, and 90s Artillery, and even then it's not quite what they were doing.

Quoting myself from five years ago: "The lack of bass never bothered me on this album, but there are these annoying oomph sounds in the negative space between two guitar notes that I find very irritating."

Is no one else bothered by this? I returned my first CD copy because of these noises, only to discover they were part of the record. Just listen to Blackened from 2:36 to 3:05, but it's everywhere. I want to hear riffs but I only hear oomph.

I just found out that I can get rid of those noises by filtering out everything around 150 Hz. Such an improvement!

I do know when I played it through my computer speakers in high school, the speakers frequently made a noise that sounded like objects were falling over in the cabinet under them, a very 'rumbly' sound, which might be the same thing?

listening to it now and I can definitely hear the oomph sounds, I'd never noticed before, possibly just naturally filtered out by the copying process on my cassette copy of a copy which I had as a kid and which is still what I mentally hear when I think of this album.

Now I think I'm going to end up with a headache if I listen to this full album, so weird, thanks a lot ArchCarrier

Maybe it's because it's always been a headphone album for me, but I'm not hearing what you guys are hearing (on Tidal through my laptop, good Sony headphones). I hear bass in the mix, but that's it. It's not even, like, Jlin levels of bass. Just some low end, exactly what people always used to bitch wasn't there!

I've noticed that thing with the palm-muted guitars on occasion, only on certain systems though (like cranked through the car on an old ipod). I think it's because they really pushed the lows on the guitars, but they're really these low mid frequencies that can sound weird on certain speakers, if your system is also emphasizing those frequencies.

yeah, I tried again on headphones and it wasn't there so I guess it's just these speakers plugged into my computer

The God That Failed is the Black Album song I find popping into my head the most these days.

the weirdest one to me is "My Friend of Misery".

the verse feels like heavy metal gone emo, whereas the chorus feels like hair metal with the big slick chorus and its harmonies. then it has the closest thing to an old school Metallica harmonized lead break on it towards the end.

Production on black album is so boring/ middle of the road, I think that’s the problem

“Sad but true” at 1.25x with ajfa production ftw

I was at the Monsters of Rock festival in 1988 when Metallica previewed this album, only playing a couple of songs from it, tentatively, and asking the crowd what they thought