In the case of Metallica, as with U2, that’s a true statement. It’s metaphysical: We’re everywhere! We rule the air around us! And each of us is iconic enough to stand on his own.” Our band-ness isn’t literal - four dudes with instruments clumped together in the same place on stage. They’re saying, “Behold! We are so mythic and potent, such a force of a band, that we don’t need to stand together to be a band. It’s a strategy that allows them to play simultaneously to different parts of the audience, but splitting themselves into four separate units is also Metallica’s way of making a statement. In Through the Never, the four members of Metallica stand far apart on stage, as if each one was in his own arena, the same way the members of U2 did in the last concert movie that was this exciting, U2 3D (2007). Yet I loved them in Metallica Through the Never - not the songs themselves (which are still, to my ears, more dark sonic architecture than compelling music), but the spell that they cast, using sound as a kind of conduit to a hidden netherworld of dread and power. I know Metallica’s fans swear by them, and 180 million albums sold probably can’t be wrong, but sorry, they’re a band I’ve never had any use for. It was fierce, raw, and technically complicated music - and no question, they meant every growling note of it - but at the risk of coming off like a total music wuss, I confess that I simply cannot sit around listening to metal that makes Guns N’ Roses sound like ABBA. Metallica put the two together into a charged hybrid. Speed punk is anger cut with an amphetamine overdose of anxiety it is highly anti-sexual - the ultimate example of rock without the roll. Classic head-banging metal is exhila ratingly charged and sexualized - a freight train that struts. It made you want to bite down on a piece of rubber.) One of the startling coups of the thrash-metal bands, the defining one being Metallica, is that they merged two strains of music that couldn’t, in form and spirit, have seemed more opposed. Their dark, driven music, with its low-down, roar-of-the-beast chord progressions and hell-bent rhythmic change-ups, is called metal, but it also it draws heavily - too heavily, for my blood - on the speed punk of the late ’70s and early ’80s, bands like Black Flag and Bad Brains that eked out a niche of raging nihilism but didn’t, at least to me, do what the great punk bands, from the Sex Pistols to the Ramones, had succeeded in doing: expressing the aggression that comes of no hope with an electrified life force. In the rest of the movie, Metallica showcase themselves as the thrash virtuosos of doom they’ve been for more than 30 years.
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