![]() ![]() Millennials coming at this album can end up feeling like the guy who saw Hamlet and complained it was all quotations. Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. “Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…” sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Although that was really the only mediaeval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons clichés out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. This album is about storytelling – the mediaeval-influenced guitar picks on opener “Battery” should be enough to tell you that. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like “Damage Inc” and “Orion”. HBĭespite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand “R-E-S-P-E-C-T”, 50 years before the #MeToo movement. The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. When Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he “took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself”. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha Franklin Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity through The Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called “the future of music”. “European Son” is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. “Venus in Furs” is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. Side one, track one, “Sunday Morning”, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. ![]() It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. ![]()
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