Bob Rock does big, fat, and comfortable as a producer, with the latest in studio technology at his fingertips, while Discharge would have been recorded as quickly as possible on zero budget. It’s hard to sound desperate when you’re a multi-millionaire living comfortably. Metallica just can’t reproduce the same feel. Discharge’s originals are scuzzy and discordant, from a band on the verge of starvation. However, Metallica aren’t too good at Discharge, with “Free Speech For The Dumb” and “The More I See” bookending this disc. We know this because of their covers excellent of The Misfits, and Anti-Nowhere League’s utterly filthy “So What”.
These run the full gamut of Metallica’s musical tastes, and some work better than others. “Garage Inc.” as a covers and B-sides compilation album lays bare the influences mixed in to Metallica’s thrash metal roots which made “Metallica”, “Load”, and “Re-Load” the albums which led the band to world domination.ĭisc 1 of this double album is freshly recorded covers. By the turn of the millennium, Metallica had become the biggest band in metal bar none, and was surpassed in popular music by only a handful of artists, but in creating new music thrash metal had been left far behind. The band and genre was somewhat niche, and not particularly well known outside metal and alternative music scenes. The 1990s saw Metallica start the decade as thrash metal’s biggest band.