...And Justice For All: 20 Years Later

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

This record doesn't work with bass. That version of "Blackened" just sounds like...I don't know, Anthrax or something. The thin sound is half the point. AJFA is actually my favorite of the first four Metallica records, and the sound is a huge part of that.

total classic this album. oh how the mighty have fallen

The thin sound is half the point.

Yeah, the record's like an icey transmission from the wastelands.

Yeah, thin but effective. And as with so much metal, who really needs to hear the bass?

this album is a rare one that hasn't changed in standing with me since I first heard it. I like it a lot, but it has a dreadful middle including "Frayed Ends of Sanity", and "Harvester of Sorrow", which I"m sorry to say is still real boring, except for the middle instrumental break.

but the surrounding tracks, including the blistering Dyer's Eve, make up for it.

including "Frayed Ends of Sanity", and "Harvester of Sorrow", which I"m sorry to say is still real boring, except for the middle instrumental break.

The middle thrash out in Frayed is fucking epic, and I quite like the chorus as well.

Dyer's Eve is Hetfield's most heartfelt lyric and vocal performance ever, I think.

"Frayed End" has a good instrumental break in the middle, which would have enhanced a good-great song, but to me I can't get into it because I hate the verse and the chorus.

To Live is to Die though I love.

harvester of sorrow is actually one of the tracks i liked

This might actually be my favourite Metallica album by now.

Second to MoP for me.

for me it's MOP, then RTL, and it varies but is usually AJFA after that cuz Kill Em All is good but has a few tracks I'm not into.

sometimes RTL jumps to number one. the title track is just....wau

RTL for me personally

30th anniversary edition on its way

https://youtu.be/MqL04r775p4

"Metallica celebrate the 30th anniversary of their fourth album ...And Justice for All with a new “definitive” reissue. The remastered album will be released in a number of formats, including an enormous deluxe box set featuring live recordings, rough mixes, demos, interviews, and much more. It will also be available in standard edition on CD, vinyl, cassette, and digitally. It’s due out November 2 via the band’s owned Blackened Recordings."

This is still my favourite Metallica album. Dyer's Eve, some days, is my favourite Metallica song.

Don't think I'm that fussed about a reissue. I got enough thinly-baked-Walkman-hour dreams to last me a lifetime.

Album's great. Master of Puppets boxed set was awesome (once).

at this point i think master will always be "the best" but justice is probably the one i'm most interested in listening to today

Alternating beat syncopation on Blackened gets me every time

This album is a monument, still the Metallica album I pull out, and I keep finding things (usually the cool riffs under solo sections that I didn't notice before)

Frayed Ends of Sanity has the best one (and everything else)

Maybe it'll inspire another debate about the bass tracks.....

Oh god, I hope not - at this point the whole thing about Jason's bass on this record is the least possible interesting line of discussion - some of Metallica's most complex/intricate compositions are on this album, and the production has aged quite well - given what it could have sounded like with all the production trappings that were the norm in 1988.

I personally am looking forward to the vinyl Guitar Hero mix included in the deluxe box

i ordered this cd the other day, think it might be a good one....: https://www.discogs.com/Metallica-And-Justice-For-All/release/1695616

Love this record. Will either buy the single or triple disc version.

This - from the super deluxe box set - might be a back-door way of putting a bass-ier mix out there:

CD 5: Rough Mixes from the Vault

Blackened (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
…And Justice for All (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
Eye of the Beholder (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
One (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
The Shortest Straw (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
Harvester of Sorrow (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
The Frayed Ends of Sanity (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
To Live Is to Die (Acoustic Intro) (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
To Live Is to Die (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
Dyers Eve (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
Breadfan (Work in Progress Rough Mix)
The Prince (Work in Progress Rough Mix)

Just watched some of that video - the new version of the 2LP fits both discs into a single wide sleeve. The original (which I owned) was a gatefold. I'm not a vinyl person at all but that's kinda chintzy to me.

i think this is my favorite metallica record. i feel like i'm still learning things about it (to echo jordan's sentiment upthread). also "blackened" just routinely blows my mind, i really think it's their best opener

"to live is to die" is such a lovely instrumental too, so many gorgeous melodic choices. i hear echoes of that approach in "junior dad" too

and the riff in "dyers eve" sounds like someone madly sawing at a cello it's incredible

Frayed Ends of Sanity has the best one (and everything else)

― change display name (Jordan)

The build up/break leading up to the solo in FEoS is exhilarating.

Around the time of Load, Hetfield called this album "the epitome of showing off" ... in a way it is, in the sense that it shows Metallica going all-out to deliver a series of complex, winding songs with multiple time signature changes, instrumental passages and sections that are ferociously performed. Of course, this is what makes the record fucking great.

Hetfield's an absolute master of "our last album sucked, but the new one rules" interview quotes.

Has Hetfield talked much about abandoning politics in his music? How/why did it get into the music in the first place? This and Master have so much going on, thematically, and everything after has ... nothing?

I don't think he has. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say he probably stopped writing political lyrics as his and Lars's politics got farther and farther apart. Ulrich is basically a socialist, and Hetfield is somewhere between Ron Paul and some MAGA chud. So...best to avoid intra-band conflict by writing about stuff everyone can agree on.

Hetfield did a 180 on many of his old opinions - reading the lyrics to Ride The Lightning it's pretty clear:

Guilty as charged, but damn it, it ain't right
There's someone else controlling me
Death in the air, strapped in the electric chair
This can't be happening to me

Who made you God to say
"I'll take your life from you?"

lol

I wrote about the 10th anniversary of Death Magnetic for Stereogum, and talked about ...Justice a little. In there, I call it their first comeback album, since they were re-asserting themselves after Burton's death.

I vaguely remember reading something in the past few years where Hetfield said that his political views changed while on the Justice or Black Album tours, as a result of travelling around America so much and learning how people lived outside of California or something? I'll try to dig it up.

I interviewed him for 30 mins in 1997, and got in a question about his about face re: politics. the black album has "Don't tread on me" which I said to him was unmistakably a pro-Gulf war sentiment. He denied this somewhat unconvincingly, but went on to say that his travels around the world made him appreciate what he understood as American values, and that his lyrics afterwards were about "what you feel inside" (paraphrasing here) and no longer the result of watching CNN with Lars and saying lets be topical. So the band's orientation initially was to be anti-authoritarian in the manner of many of the non metal bands they liked, but clearly this was posturing on his part: when he became an older guy, late 20s-mid 30s, he reverted to the quasi-Nugent views that he probly would have had were he never to have heard Crass or Anti-Nowhere League.

Also, he got rich.

Lars is the cool one, confirmed yet again

But Echobrain remains ... the future.

So the band's orientation initially was to be anti-authoritarian in the manner of many of the non metal bands they liked, but clearly this was posturing on his part: when he became an older guy, late 20s-mid 30s, he reverted to the quasi-Nugent views that he probly would have had were he never to have heard Crass or Anti-Nowhere League.

I don't think it's fair to call it "posturing." Hetfield grew up in Downey, California, an aerospace industry town, and his parents were Christian Scientists, so he rebelled against all of that pretty hard when he was growing up, as one does. But as he got older, and richer, he got more conservative, which happens to about 75% of human beings. Some of it's not even "conservatism" in the red/blue Republican-Democrat sense, it's just old-guy thinking.

Many xxps - The lack of bass never bothered me on this album, but there are these annoying little oomph sounds in the negative space between two guitar notes that I find very irritating. It's very clear right after the intro of the title track, as soon as the drums kick in, but once you hear it, it's all over the record. Anyway, excited for the rough mixes.