Metallica
Master of Puppets

[We are informed that this review also appears on horrormagazine.it signed by Alessandro Carrara and on ciao.it signed by disu.]

For metal, the '80s were one of the most prolific periods of the genre: every era has its milestones, and Master of Puppets by Metallica is certainly one of these.

Considered by many as a masterpiece, listening to just a few seconds of the first track is enough to realize you are dealing with something very different from a simple good thrash metal album. At that time, right after the explosion of the new wave of British heavy metal and its export to California by a young and promising Danish tennis player named Lars Ulrich, all bands were engaged in advancing this discourse towards increasingly complex harmonic and contrapuntal structures, sometimes losing the energy and rage of the new metal, all speed and violence. This is certainly not one of those cases: the album exudes, in addition to enormous technical and compositional mastery, a spirit of rebellion against everything and everyone, as immediately seen from the cover, which depicts the main theme of the album's lyrics: the puppeteer, an almost superhuman entity that manipulates people to achieve its goals, in the various Battery, Master of Puppets, Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Disposable Heroes, and Leper Messiah, the antagonist is the family, the society of the "normals", drugs, the government, militarism, and religion (or rather, those who exploit religion for commercial purposes). Exceptions to this conceptual thread (almost like a concept album) are The Thing That Should Not Be, an evidently Cthulhu myth-related song, and Damage Inc., a programmatic manifesto of the band's sound, somewhat like Whiplash from the debut album.

The reasons for this choice are mainly found in James Hetfield's adolescence, author of most of the lyrics, raised in a family belonging to a very obscurantist religious group. From the purely musical side, one can see the elements already present in the previous album, "Ride the Lightning", brought to maturity: the use of acoustic guitars in prologues or interludes, the harmonization of guitars in the solo parts combined with extreme thrash rhythms both in terms of execution speed (the metronomic speed of the title track is 220 beats per minute!) and fingering complexity, and a surprising compositional density (always taking the title track as an example, in an eight-minute song we have more than twenty different rhythmic parts, irregular bars, two solos, a tripartite fast-slow-fast structure typical of classical concerts). All this makes the repertoire of this album a challenge for any guitarist, drummer, or bassist who wants to play this material.
It's impossible to overlook the importance of Cliff Burton, as a composer and musician, in this album: in fact, for many, Metallica's downfall will begin right from that unfortunate night on the icy roads of Sweden when the band's bus overturned, crushing this artist today almost ignored by the general public. In "Master of Puppets" the peak of inventiveness is reached in the instrumentals Orion and The Thing That Should Not Be, where it is possible to demonstrate how a bass can actually play as a solo instrument and guide the guitars from a harmonic point of view, something that in this otherwise barbaric epoch from a musical standpoint is considered impossible.

All this, of course, is not found in any thrash metal album, and this is perhaps why in 1986 Metallica's third album managed to sell more than a million copies without having a single or a video to drive the LP, a choice then dictated by the band's policy of not wanting to compromise with the "commercial" side of the music world, a decision that, alas, was revoked from the next album until reaching the levels we know today.

Ultimately, Master of Puppets is a must-listen for every genre lover and is also an excellent antidote for eardrums now stressed by what is sold today as metal.