Four studio albums, three lead guitarists, three drummers. The Los Angeles firm that Dave Mustaine and David Ellefson kept running through every one of those changes, Megadeth, had fitted Chris Poland and Gar Samuelson, then Jeff Young and Chuck Behler, and twice watched the whole engine room ripped out of the chassis between records. By the end of 1989 the only permanent parts were the two men holding the screwdrivers. Then came the last fitting.
Hired early in 1990 on the strength of a solo record called Dragon's Kiss, Marty Friedman took the lead guitar, while Nick Menza, promoted from Behler's drum technician to the stool itself, took the kit, and the two newcomers walked straight into Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park, California, to cut their first record with the band on a fourth album that had to make up for three years of wreckage. The sessions did not run smoothly. Mike Clink, co-producing with Mustaine, left partway through for the Guns N' Roses sessions that became Use Your Illusion, engineer Micajah Ryan finished the vocals and rhythm guitars, and Max Norman mixed. Mustaine told Decibel on 19 October 2020 that the record was "by no means an easy child to birth". Released by Capitol on 24 September 1990, it climbed to number 23 on the Billboard 200 and number 8 in Britain, drew a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance and went platinum in America in 1994.
Picture a watchmaker's bench under a hard white lamp. A movement that has stopped twice is emptied onto the felt, the old balance wheel goes into the scrap tin, and two new parts are cut by hand, not ordered from a catalogue, to fit a mechanism whose drawings exist only in one man's head. That is the line-up of Rust in Peace. It is also the record: nine songs assembled to the tolerance of a hairspring and wound until the case creaks.
The movement, wound tight
The opener starts the escapement ticking. "Holy Wars... The Punishment Due" runs six minutes and thirty six seconds and spends them the way a watch spends its mainspring, through the small toothed catch that lets an enormous store of force out one measured click at a time: riffs that change gait without dropping the beat, a title in two halves that the song honours by shifting its whole footing midway, and a Friedman solo with a Middle Eastern cast that saws clean through the blues-box habits of the standard thrash lead. The aggression is total. It never arrives as a flood.
"Hangar 18" is the showroom piece. Its subject is a sealed military hangar holding things that did not come from here, and its second half hands the lead back and forth between Mustaine and Friedman in a chain of solos that turns like a wheel train, each gear driving the next and none of them allowed to slip a tooth. It is the proof that the new guitarist came in as a partner, not a session hand, and the bandleader has never pretended otherwise:
"Marty Friedman was the secret weapon that made [Rust in Peace] an album no one can touch."Dave Mustaine, Guitar World, September 2018
Then the summit. "Tornado of Souls" is sturdy thrash in its verses and a different instrument altogether once Friedman takes the middle of it, a solo as melodic as the riffs around it are clipped, the complication on the dial, the moon phase set into a field watch: nothing a soldier ever needed, and the reason anyone pries the case back open. The song is remembered for that one passage. It deserves to be.
Around those three the shorter pieces do the dirty work. "Take No Prisoners" at three minutes and twenty nine seconds and "Poison Was the Cure" at two minutes and fifty eight are fastened on without ornament, small hard screws that hold the case shut. No frills. They are there to hold, and they hold. "Dawn Patrol" is where the record divides a room. One minute and fifty one seconds of Ellefson's bass under a muttered Mustaine monologue about a planet cooked by its own smoke: hear it as filler, or hear it as the one moment the clockwork stops so the silence of the bench becomes audible. The second reading is the right one. Without that breath, "Rust in Peace... Polaris" would land on ears already numb, and instead the closer arrives fresh to aim the whole arsenal at the subject the title promised, the submarine-launched nuclear missile, and detonates the last five minutes and thirty seven seconds of the album on top of it.
The one burr on the wheel
Every part of this movement runs true except one. Mustaine's voice is machined to a different tolerance from everything around it, pitched high and thin, snarling where the guitars articulate, and on the longer held lines it grinds against the gear train like a burr nobody filed off the rim of a wheel. It is his sound and the songs were written for it. That does not make it free. It costs the record something on every chorus, it makes Rust in Peace easier to marvel at than to sing along with, and it is the reason this album stands just below the handful of records that define the genre outright rather than among them. Norman's mix is dry enough, every note left exposed, to be heard as sterile or as crystal. Crystal. On a record built entirely on exactness, exposure is the point.
Here precision is not the opposite of violence. It is the delivery system.
I judge a thrash record by its dullest track, never its best, and this one gives me nothing to judge it by. Forty minutes and fifty seconds, nine songs, a band rebuilt from the mainspring up in a matter of months, and the finished movement became the bastion every technical thrash band since has had to set its watch against. It is not flawless, and the singer is why. Buy it anyway. The prog-minded apostles who came after learned the arithmetic here. Skip it, and the rest of the genre's later arsenal reads like a tray of loose parts with no drawing to assemble them by.