Quote:
|
Originally Posted by evollove
The album sounds so bad, so wimpy, but right now I'm browsing live versions and this album has some really great songs. It seems in general they rise above most of the metal fray by writing catchy, hummable tunes. If they ever had a real singer and not some fucking cartoon, man, they might've reached brilliance.
|
Hmm... I feel you, but I can't sayI totally agree.
I think James Hetfield's vocal approach back in the early '80s was actually a pretty good fit for Metallica's sound at the time. Like most bands that hang around for 30 years, his style has changed from decade to decade.
By the time the band was selling out 30,000 seat international gigs (or shortly thereafter, on Black Album, when the expectations for immediate and unparalleled success were so high that they were hiring accomplished rock radio hit makers to engineer & mix) Hetfield's vocals came out of the basement, and lost their drowned out, murky, totally genre-appropriate horror movie feel.
So yeah, from Black Album on, James is trying for the bigger than life rockstar voice, and while he probably does have the pipes for that kind of thing, he doesn't have the kind of timbre that compliments front-of-the-mix epic vocal wailing.
But think about the difference between Misfits-era Danzig and Danzig-era Danzig. Kinda similar, y'know? Or Henry Rollins during his tenure in Black Flag vs. Henry Rollins in the Rollins Band.
The kind of metal that Metallica made early on was sort of a weird, slightly overachieving, jock cousin to heavy American punk from the same time. So in order to become as big as they wanted to be, they had to become something entirely different. Which they did. Twice... Then again. All to pretty god awful effect.
But between Kill 'Em All and Justice, they had a good thing going. If only they'd continued to write over-long, challenging, completely radio unfriendly epics like Call of Cthulu and Orion, instead of turning all of their energy toward getting 50-75% bigger with every release.