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Wednesday, November 27, 2019

Album Review: Metallica - S & M (1999)

I've never been big on live albums, really.  I've long felt that the live versions of songs were vastly inferior to the original studio recordings.  I'm far more forgiving of live versions than re-recordings, however.  Some live albums are in fact bloody great - Mad Dogs & Englishmen by Joe Cocker and Rust Never Sleeps by Neil Young and Crazy Horse are two of my all time favorite albums, and I'm quite partial to Live by AC/DC.  S & M by Metallica is another live album but with a unique twist - there is a supporting orchestra to boot - the San Francisco Symphony, to be exact.  Classical music and heavy metal music appear on paper to be very odd bed fellows, but in practice the two are quite capable of mixing quite well.  I must confess here, despite having owned this album since 2001-2002 I have only just recently listened to it in its entirety.  And I'm glad I finally got around to doing so.  I'm particularly enamored with the songs from the first four albums, such as "Master of Puppets" "Whom the Bell Tolls", and "One."  These songs always do well when performed live.  But the ones from Metallica, Load and Reload are likewise surprisingly good as well.  A rendition of "The Memory Remains" without Marianne Faithfull on backup?  I suppose the audience did well enough.  But somehow that song loses that sting it had.  All up, a pretty damn impressive collection of live renditions here.  A-


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