More than just the sound of a group of young musicians growing into their own skin, Ride The Lightning is a fearless declaration of independence from a band who were utterly determined to forge ahead on a path of entirely their own making. This, though, is the album’s only mis-step. In truth, the San Francisco Bay Area ‘Trues’ who mockingly waved Kleenex tissues at the quartet when Fade To Black was first aired on home soil might have saved their opprobrium for the album’s sixth track, Escape, a badly mis-judged, painfully self-aware attempt at naked commercialism which ranks as Metallica’s only truly dishonest song: such was the band’s own hatred of the track that it wasn’t played live until 2012 when the quartet performed Ride The Lightning in its entirety for the first time at their own Orion Music Festival. This approach was made manifest even more explicitly on the album’s most controversial track, Fade To Black, a mid-tempo ballad referencing suicidal thoughts: the inevitable ‘sell-out’ accusations which accompanied its release were informed less by feelings of disappointment, than by a keenly-felt sense of betrayal. The serrated riffs underpinning Fight Fire With Fire and Ride The Lightning might have had their origins in Thrash metal, but here they were sharper, sleeker and more incisive than anything the band had previously recorded, while For Whom The Bell Tolls was a masterclass in control and dynamics, a tale of medieval conflict made all the more dramatic and affecting by its authors’ realisation that true ‘heaviness’ could be better attained by easing up on their traditional full-tilt tempos. From the delicately-picked acoustic guitar arpeggios which introduced the roaring Fight Fire With Fire to the symphonic riffs which closed the epic … Ktulu, Ride The Lightning is an album of rare sophistication, ambition and power, effortlessly transcending the boundaries of what they had achieved with Kill ‘Em All one year previously. The results of this three week recording session were extraordinary.
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