More carefully constructed and less thrilling than Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets is still a rock goddamn solid piece of rock, everything in its right place, every part loud and fast, except for those parts that are slow and quiet so that the can better set up later hard and fast parts. No dead weight, no wind drag. Sometimes its a little too perfect, humming in place like an ersatz perpetual motion machine sluffing energy. But when it pops, it pops with precision, as on the title track's hammerbacks, Damage, Inc's thunderous closing, and Orion's shimmering, gorgeous progism.
It also represents an important move in Metallica's approach to its subject matter. My main beef with Ride the Lightning is its unimaginative leaning on death as a theme, and as Steve Huey aptly observes, Master of Puppets isn't about power so much as it's about powerlessness. On Lightning Hetfield threatened from above, promising destruction. Here he is merely the harbinger of a greater destruction than himself, telling of doom coming for us all, facing it with defiance and despair, alongside us and as helpless as anyone, making the message at once all the more relatable and all the more terrifying. I can't overstate how much this shift changes the entire feel of the album: it's a move that allows the band to escape its own ridiculousness and become a portent of something larger, achieving greatness via abjection of the throne. This everyman toughguy/vulnerability angle was crucial to their breakthrough appeal on the Black Album, and beats grunge to the punch by about half a decade. Its enough to make you wonder if these guys don't have friends in low places. Real low. Like, in hell 4/5
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