It’s a delicious intricacy and it’s vintage Metallica. Hetfield and Hammett rip through one of Metallica’s most epic beginnings but the real star is Burton, whose bass introduces the song’s second best riff before the guitars even get near it. From the literal tolling of the bell at the start to the sinister finality of its end, it’s flawless. Inspired by the 1940 Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name, it paints a picture with extraordinary vividness and clarity. The first begins with an acoustic introduction and then explodes like a hydrogen bomb and just keeps on going.īut in ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ Metallica found a truly special formula and one of the very brightest songs of their entire history. While there’s always been a melodic element to Metallica’s sound, an element that plays a part in ‘Fight Fire With Fire’ in particular, the first two songs on Ride The Lightning are thrash how thrash should be. But when their thrash chops are questioned it’s the beginning of Ride The Lightning that provides the most powerful rebuke. Why, then, do we still talk about Metallica as a thrash metal band? Because that’s exactly what they were at their core in the early days and they were innovators even then. In doing so Metallica set the tone for not only the songs that followed, but the albums too. ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ moved the basic tenets of thrash into a more mature version of themselves. The third track – not the fourth as one might assume – is arguably the defining song of their early development. Metallica’s 1984 release forms a journey from the thrash metal puritanism of the opening tracks to the instrumental experimentation of the last. What’s incontrovertibly true is that Ride The Lightning completed the job. That Kill ‘Em All was creatively bigger than a genre it helped to form is undoubtedly a controversial suggestion. That’s due in no small part to the basic veracity of the viewpoint but it’s also because Metallica’s first album arguably outstripped thrash metal before it ever really began.Įven on that first album Metallica were dealing in riffs over outright speed, in classically-rooted melodic metal over the flat-out aggression and maniacal arms race that defined so many of their peers. Though Metallica are often credited as part of the clutch of bands who created the thrash metal genre it’s Exodus whose first record, Bonded By Blood, is widely considered the Bay Area thrash archetype. In the crisp darkness of the Scandinavian nights Rasmussen guided Ulrich, Hetfield, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and bass player Cliff Burton through the production of the most underestimated record of their career Ride The Lightning was recorded in a matter of weeks but its legacy for the band and for heavy metal in general is undeniable. Throughout much of their career Metallica have recorded at night – Ulrich’s preference for doing so being central to the decision – and they slept at Sweet Silence during the daytime. He was born in Gentofte, to the north of Copenhagen, and arrived with his band on a wintry corner of Strandlodsvej and Øresundsvej to settle in to the studio that would be not only the office for the next month, but home. Ulrich, who founded Metallica with Hetfield in California in 1981, knew Copenhagen well. The studio was situated a few blocks from the beach towards the northern end of the island of Amager, a short distance from Copenhagen Airport and just along the coast from where the remarkable Øresundsbroen now connects the city with Malmö on the other side of the Øresund strait. Rasmussen and Sweet Silence were developing a reputation for, in the Dane’s own words, his speed as an engineer and in gaining an understanding the needs of the artist regardless of their genre. He produced his first album in 1982 but had become a co-owner of Sweet Silence, the studio he built with Freddy Hansson in 1976, a couple of years before working with Richie Blackmore’s Rainbow. Rasmussen, like Metallica, was a relative rookie. They disembarked in Denmark having recently had all their equipment stolen in Boston and trudged to Sweet Silence Studios to record their second album with a copy of the first – producer Flemming Rasmussen had never heard the record – and the riff tapes that provided the raw materials for drummer Lars Ulrich and singer/guitarist James Hetfield to build the new songs. Kill ‘Em All, their debut album, had been a critical triumph but they barely had two quarters to rub together. By the time they arrived in Copenhagen in February 1984 Metallica were established as thrash metal pioneers.
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