Three 65, Day 4
Metallica, Master Of Puppets

The question was recently posed to me: Master Of Puppets or Ride The Lightning? And I really had to think about that, because both albums are so close in tone and structure (especially the latter) that they're almost indistinguishable. This is not to detract from either album; both of them are stone cold classics, and I think Ride The Lightning may actually be a smidge better than Puppets, simply because it came first and established a sound that has become rote in the heavy metal world. But for me, I'll take Puppets over Lightning any day.

Why? Well, whereas Ride The Lightning comes first chronologically, I was first introduced to Metallica via Master Of Puppets, which remains the ideal starting place for the neophyte who wants to explore the band's discography. A perfect album in every respect, Puppets cemented the band's reputation as the premier godfathers of thrash metal.

A lot of people deride Metallica for their bullshit, and that's okay: The band has plenty of skeletons in their closet. There's the Napster thing, which showed Metallica up for the rich assholes they really are; there's also the whole hazing of bassist Jason Newsted, which showed Metallica up for the exclusionist assholes they really are; and finally there's drummer Lars Ulrich's endless rich-guy bullshit, which showed Lars Ulrich up for the all-around asshole he really is. These issues aside, once the personalities are divorced from the music (and once the discography is divorced from the sub-par blues-grunge that made the 90s such a bad time to be a Metallica fan), you can really begin to appreciate just how talented these guys really are.

Master Of Puppets was the last album to feature original bassist Cliff Burton, who died in an auto accident while the band was on tour in Europe. He went out with a bang, and I'm not talking about the tour bus that fell on him. Starting with some deceptively pretty classical guitar, things get started early on "Battery," the album's first track, and the speed only picks up from there. The title track, a chilling indictment of addiction and cocaine abuse ("chop your breakfast on a mirror"), remains one of Metallica's finest moments on an album thoroughly riddled with them.

All of the songs on Puppets are about insanity in some way (except for "The Thing That Should Not Be," which is about H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos): the insanity of war ("Disposable Heroes"), the insanity of religion ("Leper Messiah," which features a killer bass groove underneath the usual thrashy strumundrang), the insanity of insanity ("Welcome Home"). True to form, there's also an instrumental, the almost-forgot-the-album-was-on-until-the-song-picks-up "Orion," which, while dismissed by many hardcore fans, is, in my opinion, their finest instrumental in a career surrounded by them.

Things would go downhill for Metallica after this, at least as far as quality was concerned. The follow-up, recorded after Burton's death, was ...And Justice For All, which is a good but overly complex development on the sound found on Puppets. The follow-up to that was The Black Album, which features a poppier refinement on the band's signature noise. And, of course, who can forget the lost decade that followed? But in 1986, when they released Puppets to universal critical acclaim - at a time when metal was firmly a forbidden, underground treat - they had the world by the balls, and that, I think, is what makes me choose Puppets over Lightning, time and time again.