Metallica
Garage Inc.
The Band: James Hetfield- rhythm guitar
Kirk Hammet- lead guitar, back-up vocals
Jason Newsted- bass
Lars Ulrich- drums
Garage Inc. This definitely isn’t my favourite Metallica album. After all, it’s not even their own material. It’s just a collection of songs by other composers that Metallica covered. Seems almost lazy, but none the less I do love this album. Most of the songs are very well done, some of them are even an improvement on the originals. Although, there are a few exceptions. For example, “Turn The Page” originally written by Bob Seger was utterly butchered.
At this point in Metallica’s career they were trapped in sort of a downward spiral. They had just released “Load” and “Reload”. Needless to say, these albums didn’t do that well. The majority of Metallica’s fans were extremely disappointed with the transition from their thrash roots to hard rock. Metallica have yet to escape from this downward spiral. After this album they released a greatest hits album (S&M), which did fairly well, but also shouldn’t really count because it’s songs they already knew people liked. After S&M “St. Anger” was released. Unlike Load and Reload this album was metal. Although, it still wasn’t much of an improvement. The fans hated it, some even deserted Metallica. But the more loyal fans (me) are still waiting patiently for them to get themselves out of this rut. Anyways, although they are still in this rut I think this is probably the high point of it.
Now I’d like to get into why the band decided to put this album out. As previously mentioned the band was in a rut. The fans simply weren’t responding to their newer material. The negative feedback caused some arguments between members of the band. Mostly between James and Lars. Their was a tremendous amount of pressure on Metallica. The public was anxiously awaiting their next move after their previous two disastrous albums. James had remembered that in the early days of the band something they talked about doing was putting out a CD of cover songs to pay homage to some of the great musicians that inspired them. So, James threw the idea of “Garage Inc.” on the table. The band all agreed it was a good idea. The album might not turn our that well, but if it didn’t they wouldn’t be to blame because it wasn’t their material. Also, the album bought the band time to regroup and come out with some better material for their next album. Unfortunately Metallica failed to make good use of this time. They continued to quarrel and Jason eventually left the band.
Because of the fact that the songs on this album are all composed by different artists it’s quite obvious that theirs is a wide array of different sounding songs. There’s a lot of softer more tender songs for example, Tuesday’s Gone and Astronomy. Theirs is also some more classic rock sounding stuff in there, for example Sabbra Cadabra. Pretty much the entire second disc is metal. Nothing wrong there.
As I mentioned earlier a lot of the covers were well done. Hetfield did a good hob of adapting his vocals in some areas to better suite the voice of the artist who wrote the song and in situations where he simply couldn’t imitate the artist’s voice he managed to make his own voice fit into the song. Kirk did a stupendous job with the lead guitar. He managed to pull off all of the solos and make them sound like they did when played be the original composer. He even threw some of his own material in their to spice up some songs. The bass and drums are nothing to go on and on about but they did their job, keeping good rhythm throughout and their was the occasional song where the drums and/or bass got a moment to shine. A couple songs had some different instruments thrown in as well. For example the harmonica in Tuesday’s Gone.
Overall Rating: 3.5/5
Pros: Songs were well covered
The solos Kirk threw in went well with the songs
James did a good job with the vocals
Cons: Some songs were butchered
Recommended Tracks:
-Whiskey In The Jar
-Astronomy
-Tuesday’s Gone
-Blitzkrieg
-Breadfan
All in all this album is pretty good listen. If you’re not a die hard Metallica fan you might not want to pick this up. It’s no where near as good as their other albums. And if you’re one of those people who only likes their older material disc one is not for you. Disc two however, you might like. This album has grown on me, personally. It showed me some good songs that I wouldn’t have known existed if they hadn’t covered them and it turned me onto some other bands that before listening to this I wasn’t really fond of. Hope you enjoyed the review, also. This is Metallicaman signing off.
Metallicaman
