Do you have 16 hours to dedicate to Metallica?

On September 10, 2021, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the album’s release “Metallica” (known as ‘The Black Album’), an impressive box set entitled “The Metallica Blacklist” was released in which other artists paid homage to the album Californian band proposing album covers. This is our review of that box.

“There are people who release 10-CD box sets of what was once a single album. But if that stuff wasn’t released there’s a reason: it didn’t work”: looking at the tracklist of the mega-reissue of Metallica’s “Black Album” this sentence came to mind, from an interview with Warren Ellis, Nick Cave’s right-hand man. Personally, I’m a fan of this kind of operation: I like listening to demos and outtake to understand how a record arrived at its final form. In some cases they also have a historical documentary value, when the record is an established masterpiece. But I understand Warren Ellis’s point, because sometimes it is exaggerated: “Metallica” has reached at least its fourth reissue; the “deluxe box set” that is also available on the platforms consists of 193 songs for 12 hours of music. Plus the 53 songs and 4 hours of this “blacklist”. Do you have 16 hours to dedicate to Metallica?

There is no doubt that the “Black Album” is one of the most important rock albums of the 90s (and beyond): it definitively brought metal into the mainstream, taking advantage of that time window in which guitars also worked on MTV and the radio.

It is right to celebrate it extensively, for its 30 years: but what can you invent new, after the previous reprints? The most interesting part of this operation is not the total opening of the archives, the 5 LPs, 14 CDs and 6 DVDs of the box, aimed above all at mega-fans: “riffs & demos”, “pre-production rehearsals” and “radio edits”, “rough & alternate mixes”, concerts and what, with self-irony, they define .bonus shit. The most interesting thing is the so-called “Metallica blacklist”, a parallel operation: carte blanche to about fifty artists: choose the song you want from the black album, redo it as you want, with whoever you want.

The result is a sort of “Donda of the tribute album”: just as Kanye West’s album rejects and distances itself from any scheme of the classic album, the “Metallica blacklist” is the negation of the curated and reasoned homage, like those of the late Hal Willner, for example. Inside everything and everyone – without a real logical thread: “Nothing else matters” has 12 versions and some songs only 1…

The songs from the Black Album, from first to last, remade by artists, arranged in alphabetical order: starting with “Enter Sandman” in the Alessia Cara version.

There is really a bit of everything: we must give credit to Metallica for having managed to represent different genres and origins, from rock to Latin music, from indie to instrumental music, to artists from all over the world (one of the most curious things to our Western ears is the version of “The unforgiven” by the Indian Vishal Dadlani). Some are artists who come from the world of Metallica or from neighboring environments (Ghost, Corey Taylor, to name the most famous), but there are those who have remixed the original tracks (the Neptunes) and there is a rich Latin contingent, led by Juanes and J Balvin. The problem, if anything, is that this choice still has several shortcomings. And inevitably there is a lack of homogeneity: and the sequence is not such, it is in fact a pure alphabetical order: the only way to listen to the Metallica Blacklist is the shuffle function or to create a personal playlist with your favorite artists. Listening in sequence can be done perhaps once out of curiosity, and takes a good 4 hours.

Two songs, “Of Wolf and Man” and “The Struggle Within”, have only one version and the latter only the instrumental one by Rodrigo y Gabriela: the lack of a “curatorship” is evident from what is not really a detail. Maybe other artists could have been involved in the “minor” songs? Obviously the most popular songs are also the most predictable (in addition to “Nothing else matters”, “Enter sandman” and “The unforgiven” and “Sad but true”). Big names are missing: I would not have minded seeing bands like U2 or Pearl Jam (to cite examples of rocker-superstars contemporary or preceding Metallica) struggling with one of these songs, and maybe even singer-songwriters like Patti Smith or Nick Cave. The historic names in the end are almost completely absent, with the exception of Elton John (playing piano for Miley Cyrus) and Dave Gahan (a beautiful minimal version of “Nothing else matters”). It’s all well and good to show the influence of Metallica and this album on the following generations, but even here a little more curation wouldn’t have hurt…

I set aside 12 songs out of 54: the covers that convinced me the most are almost always those that take the songs and bring them somewhere else.

An exception in my choices is the very straight version of “Nothing else matters” by Miley Cyrus (who vocally sounds more and more like Stevie Nicks, and that’s a great compliment) with Elton John and Yo-Yo Ma and Weezer who remake “Enter sandman” exactly (but here it’s more affection for the band than anything else). My absolute favorites are “Sad but true” in the electro-pop version by St. Vincent and the blues version by Jason Isbell. Then, always in a blues key, a wonderful Chris Stapleton again on “Nothing else matters”. The winners, for me, are My Morning Jacket – who always remake “Nothing else matters” distorting it and transforming it into a rhythmic indie song – and Moses Sumney who reinterprets “The unforgiven” in an almost jazz key for voice and bass. Also beautiful are the performances by Phoebe Bridgers and Cage The Elephant: they also work by subtraction, taking away the epic from their songs, with original versions, as does Dave Gahan. Finally, noteworthy Kamasi Washington, who reinterprets “My friend of misery” for big band, as if it were a song by Charles Mingus.