METALLICA — The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited (review)

METALLICA — The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited album cover EP · 1987 · Thrash Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Negoba
Iconic thrash album, essential Metallica

During Metallica's peak run (RTL through Justice) this product was just as popular and essential listening as any of full length LPs. The energy here is so good, the band is at their most powerful, the song choices are perfect. Yes......it's a cover album. And all of it is available in Garage, Inc.

I don't know if this thing is even available anymore, because it got absorbed. But Garage, Inc. is so hit and miss that one would easily lose the fact that this EP was a monster. Metallica did in fact have some other good covers during their peak, but Garage, Inc spans too wide and includes some true schlock.

Not so Garage Days Re-revisited. Everything here is perfect. The songs range from breakneck fast (Green Hell) to thunderhead heavy doom drag (The Small Hours). James Hetfield actually sings and it sounds like metal not some coached failed crooning which appears first on the Black Album and is still evident even on Death Magnetic. Hammett's solos are aggressive and fast, frenetic and he's yet to have his foot permanetly glued to the wah, never to play a good guitar solo again (also Black album onward). Newcomer Jason Newstead is loud and rockin' here, unlike the following LP where he's inaudible. The bass breaks in Crash Course in Brain Surgery are perfect, energetic, the new guy more than just holding down the bottom. Lars is in the pocket, recorded right in your face.

But most of all the riffs are so friggin great. It's as if Hetfield picked the best riffs of all time, applied his sold-his-soul-to-Satan right wrist and immense tone and you get heaviness that is still rarely matched and probably never bested 20+ years later. Helpless, the Wait, well every single song, are just so HEAVY. The guitars just pummel. Not with sixteenths but syncopation, attack, and pure dangerous attitude. Hetfield's vocal delivery is similarly as scary as it's ever been. You cannot touch me. You would not dare, he sings in perhaps his lowest notes on the album. He sings the infamous Last Caress with both punk disdain for all humanity but metal's love of evil, and for a short time Metallica was indeed the most dangerous band on the planet.
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