This is the record thrash metal measures itself against, and it was taken with a siege plan the band had already used once. Released through Elektra on 3 March 1986, the third album by the Bay Area quartet Metallica dragged its engines up to a genre that still thought of itself as a raiding party from the tape-trading underground and smashed a hole through the curtain wall so wide that every band marching into the city for the next forty years, from the rehearsal-room hopefuls to the stadium regiments, has had to climb in over its rubble. Nothing on it is wasted. One thing on it is borrowed, and what it borrows is its own blueprint.
The ground had been surveyed two years earlier on Ride the Lightning. Recorded between 1 September and 27 December 1985 at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen, with Flemming Rasmussen co-producing beside the band and Michael Wagener mixing in Los Angeles in January 1986, the line-up of James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Cliff Burton cut eight songs, three of them past eight minutes, and not one of them sounds as if it was allowed in to fill a side. The songwriting is tighter than anything the four had put their name to before. It climbed to number 29 on the Billboard 200 with no help from radio. It became the band's first gold record. The certificates have since reached eight times platinum.
The siege train
A battery, in the gunner's sense, is a row of cannon dug into the earth facing a wall, and "Battery" behaves exactly like one. The acoustic prelude is the quiet of men ranging their guns in the grey before dawn; then the electric guitars open fire, and the opening riff lands like the first salvo against the rampart, fast, level and aimed, every downstroke a round that strikes the same stone as the one before it. It is the most focused opener the band had written. It does not introduce the album. It starts the bombardment.
Behind it rolls the heaviest engine in the train. Eight minutes and thirty-six seconds long, the title track "Master of Puppets" is a trebuchet with its counterweight loaded to the pins, a machine built out of tempo changes and time-signature shifts that winches itself back through verse after verse before the arm swings. The swing is the middle section. The storm drops away, a clean melody takes the field, and Hammett climbs into a solo that stands among the finest he has recorded, before the whole apparatus cranks back to full speed and hurls the last verses over the wall. A song about addiction built like a machine for throwing rocks at a city. It is the reason the record is remembered, and it earns it.
"The Thing That Should Not Be" drags a Lovecraft horror up to the walls at a crawl, the slow heavy song in third place, and it hands over to the album's sapper. "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" digs. It works quietly under the foundations, a patient song about an asylum ward, clean guitars and a held-back voice, while the charge is packed into the tunnel a barrel at a time; when it finally goes up, the ground under the song lurches and the ward's walls come down in the last minutes at full thrash tempo. That slow fuse is the album's great structural trick. "Disposable Heroes" then marches its conscript to the front and "Leper Messiah" turns the guns on the preachers of the television pulpit, and by the end of the sixth song the record has made its case on three subjects without once lowering its voice.
A siege engine this well built does not need a new battlefield to win. It needs a wall, and in 1986 thrash had one.
A ceasefire at night
Then the guns go quiet. "Orion" is an instrumental of eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and in it the bassist from Castro Valley, Cliff Burton, steps out between the lines like a lone figure crossing no man's land by moonlight, carrying the melody on four strings while the rest of the band holds its fire around him. Burton's bass is loud and audible across the whole record, never buried under the guitars, and here it is the thing the whole song is arranged around: his finest moment on tape, and the one hour in the campaign when the besieger stops to look at the stars. The record around it is also his last studio album. On 27 September 1986, at twenty-four, he was killed when the band's tour bus crashed near Dorarp in Sweden.
"It was kind of the end of the Cliff Burton era in Metallica ... there's still an innocence about it and just a real 'fuck you, world' attitude to it."
James Hetfield, interviewed by Rock City (Japan), reported 31 August 2006
The ceasefire ends in a storming. "Damage, Inc." is the breach itself, the ram through the gate and the garrison running, five and a half minutes of flat-out thrash driven through the streets of the fallen city with no quarter given and none expected. After the better part of an hour of siegecraft the band closes on pure assault. It is the right order. The engineers hand the city to the infantry.
The same plan, twice
The flaw is real, and it sits in the floor plan. Lay the running order beside Ride the Lightning and the two albums share a floor plan: an opener that begins on acoustic guitar and then opens fire, the title track in second place, a slow heavy song third, a quiet song fourth that explodes before it ends, a long instrumental in the final stretch. The only new room is the last one: where the 1984 record ends on its instrumental, Master of Puppets bolts a fast closer on after it. It fills every other room of that plan better than Ride the Lightning did, and the sequencing is close to perfect because it had already been tested under fire. But it is the plan of a campaign already fought. The masterpiece did not invent its own architecture; it perfected the architecture of the album before it. That is the only thing standing between this record and a perfect mark, and the only argument against it worth having.
This is the rampart every later thrash record has had to scale, from the bands who copied it to the bands who spent whole careers trying to get out from under its shadow, and anyone who calls himself a thrash listener without knowing it by heart is defending a city he has never seen. Start with "Battery". Stay for "Orion". Hear what was lost seven months after it came out.