I dont know why but I really like ...And Justice For All and St. Anger they are some of my favorite records of all time. Why do people always shun them?
Personally, I don't dislike And Justice For All...it's actually the last Metallica album that I liked.
IMO, it was their 1st album that I didn't like *
everything* on, though.
In the cases of Kill em All, Master of Puppets, and Ride the Lightning - I liked every single track on them...I could just let any one of those albums play & replay, over and over again, w/o ever wanting to skip to the next song. And Justice For All was the 1st album with any songs that I thought were "
skip-able".
I thought that "
The Frayed Ends of Sanity" was decent, I liked "
Blackened", really liked "
One", and *
Love* "
Dyer's Eve".
But, "
...And Justice For All, Eye of the Beholder, The Shortest Straw, Harvester of Sorrow, & To Live Is to Die", were all, IMO (while I wouldn't call them "bad" songs), they just didn't live up to the precedent that they'd set by releasing 3 consecutive albums w/o any songs that I could...take or leave.
Also, iirc, like half of the songs were...what - something like 7 to10 minutes each?
IMO, these much longer (Iron Maiden-ish) "epic" length songs weren't well-suited for this band (or, maybe it was more of a case of the band not being well-suited to those types of songs).
Honestly, though - having been a fan of Metallica from the start (Shit, I remember me + a bunch of friends walking out of school in shock and disbelief the day we heard that Cliff Burton died --and-- how almost 1/4 of the school didn't show up to school the next day either because we were all together doing...'stuff' and 'things' as a memorial to him), AND I still
remember a lot of the things that the band *originally* stood for (those same things that resonated with us teen-agers and that drew us in, as fans) and, more importantly, the things that they *
SAID* back then...such as "
We'll never make any song that'd ever be played on the radio, we're all in it strictly for the love of our fans + all of our love of creating & performing our music live for them, and, you will certainly NEVER see a video of a Metallica song on MTV or ever see US using one of those fucking orchestras...like all of these more sell-out types of bands have been flocking to these days just because it's the "thing to do"...It's all of these things that we don't do, don't care about or pay attention to, and that we'd never do that are at the very heart of what it means be Metallica".
So, (with and) after AND Justice For All, came (the very radio-friendly; almost pop/top 40-ish) "
Enter Sandman", bunches of videos, more & more radio play, "
those fucking orchestras", the whole "Napster" thing (stinking of greed, corporate, and "Forgot where we came from + what we used to be & mean")...which, inevitably, led to lots of pissed of & disillusioned (EX)Fans of what Metallica
used to be, like myself
/rant
