Metallica – Metallica (Times Music) Rs. 499/-

A head bangers collector’s edition for sure – the Metallica DVD is a recording about the band’s biggest album to date ‘the Black Album’ also self – titled as Metallica. With footage recorded during Jason Newsted’s period with the band, the album contains some of Metallica’s most famous tracks too date like Enter Sandman, Sad but True, Nothing Else Matters, The Unforgiven, Holier Than Thou and Wherever I may roam being the main focus.

Labeled by Lars Ulrich as the answer to Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, the Black album took a lot of hard work, to become one of the band’s best albums to date. “The album had no theme, it just had a black cover with no name, just the name of the band of course and the snake at the side” states Lars. Right from their days in 1989 to 1997 the year this album was made, it’s been one long journey for the four members namely, James Hetfield and long time friend of 19 years Lars Ulrich, and other band members Kirk Hammet and Jason Newsted.

The DVD brings on producer Bob Rock into the limelight as the guiding force in Metallica’s new sound on the Black album. While the band’s first four albums were produced entirely by Lars and James, they had no route to follow, thus you had unwanted loud guitars and heavy drums on albums like ‘Kill ‘em All’, ‘Ride the lightning’, Master of Puppets’ and the ‘And Justice for all’.

After Rock joined in you had the band speaking on the importance of having a good producer to help them and their reason for bringing in Bob Rock. Through interviews, sound and vocal rehearsals, it shows the changes Rock made and the repulsions the band had initially towards him, changing from dissatisfaction to acceptance of the change in recording their music and writing lyrics to the songs. Each member shows his thankfulness to Rock after the outcome of the album’s immense success and the manner he handled each song.

Infact it’s interesting to know how Bob Rock actually got on the bandwagon to rescue Metallica and make them sound anew. “Richie Sambora from Bob Jovi had approached me to work on their album and so had Metallica. I had a choice now and did not know what to do. I went on a two week holiday with my wife and kids and while I was driving down the Grand Canyon I saw a young man seated on the side walk wearing a Metallica T –shirt and I said wow.” recalls Rock in an interview to a webstie. “Later I was at a gas station when I heard the radio blaring a Metallica song. It was there that I decided that Metallica was the band I would work with. I knew how popular they were. I came back and called Richie and said I am sorry.”

The DVD has interesting interviews with all the band members, studio shots of recording most of the main tracks of the ‘Black’ album and the many retakes and the final cuts of the six songs. The interesting detail in each track as it sounded, like Hammet’s original riff for ‘Enter Sandman’ to its instrumental version, to the optional orchestral sound on ‘Nothing Else Matters’ was intentionally supposed to have. 

A DVD no Metallica fan would want to miss out on.

Rating: ****

Reviewed By Verus Ferreira