I doubt …And Justice For All is many people’s favourite Metallica album. It is, however, objectively their best, anticipating the subtractive aesthetic of Tool’s Aenima (rock without rock, dehistrionised, dehystericised; rock with a hysterectomy), and oddly in tune with MBV’s Loveless in its studio-bound derealisation of guitar noise (if this seems implausible, listen again to the opening seconds of Blackened, the way multiple guitar parts fade in, heavily compressed and stripped of their natural dynamics, sounding almost as if they were recorded backwards).
What’s missing from …And Justice For All is of course the bass: both the actual playing of the late Cliff Burton, and - thanks to Flemming Rasmussen’s much-maligned production - the aural signature of his replacement, Jason Newsted. There is, in fact, plenty of bass in the mix: what has been removed, spirited away, is the attack of the instrument, the envelope of individual notes punctuating the arrangement. This is not the only way Burton makes his absence felt: the monumental character of the album is further cemented by its rigorous consistency of tonality (aolian minor scales and tritone leaps between power chords throughout) and timbre, its remorseless (or overwhelmingly remorseful) adherence to a confined, autistic musical code.
The poem of Burton’s that is read out in the middle of “To Live Is To Die” cribs rather startlingly from Shelley, a crib that has not I think been widely remarked. Here are Burton’s lines, and below is the text from whence ‘twas ripped:
When a man lies, he murders
Some part of the world.
These are the pale deaths
Which men miscall their lives.
All this I cannot bear
To witness any longer.
Cannot the kingdom of salvation
take me home?
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
The source, appropriately enough, is Shelley’s Adonais: his elegy for Keats, slain by a bad review of Croker’s. Was Burton an avid reader of Shelley? It’s more likely that the crib is second-hand, taken from a poem of Thomas Covenant’s in Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (recall that Master of Puppets had a song titled “Leper Messiah”, a fairly obvious reference to Donaldson’s antihero). Further investigation reveals that the line “When a man lies, he murders some part of the world” is spoken by Merlin in Borman’s Excalibur. But even allowing that Burton got his misheard, or misprisioned, Shelley via Donaldson, it’s still somewhat spooky that Metallica’s elegy for their dead bandmate should ghost Adonais in this way.
I do not think that the interpretation of the song itself given here can possibly be bettered. “Incessant repeating like an infinity memory”: quite so.
A word about the guitar soloes. Kirk Hammett is not a great guitar player, but he has the particular merit of having constructed some effective solo passages that can be played, with effort, by a teenage metallist after a few months’ dedicated practice. Imagine Metallica with Shawn Lane playing the soloes. You’d just give up, put the guitar down and never pick it up again. Metallica’s music is not technically easy to play, although you get an easier ride than you would if you were to try covering Megadeth numbers from the same period, but it is accessible to anyone willing to work at it. That is a significant reason for their enduring popularity among a certain demographic: they gave teenagers with cheap electric guitars and crummy practice amps something challenging to emulate.