The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Metallica · produced by Metallica with Flemming Rasmussen · Elektra and Music for Nations · eight tracks · about 55 minutes
Mode
Thrash metal carried into long, multi-section songs: acoustic introductions, harmonised leads, a ballad that breaks into fury, an instrumental
Mythos
The master and the puppet: the drug, the elder god, the asylum keepers, the officers, the false messiah, and at the end the victim turned destroyer
Phase
Eight songs on two sides; side one from assault through the master to the madhouse, side two from the soldier and the preacher through the instrumental to revolt
Presentation
Album; eight tracks in their original order, about fifty-five minutes, three of them past eight minutes; on the sleeve a field of white crosses on strings held from above
Register
Downpicked rhythm guitar at speed, harmonised lead guitars, a bass that carries the melody once; dread and anger, with one grave calm
Scale
A list of masters, each one song’s subject, joined by one frame; no name and no place
Governing Proposition
A thrash band two years out of the clubs sets eight long songs on one figure, the master who works a person from above and speaks to him in his own voice, and finds that figure in the drug, the army, the preacher and the asylum; the sound of locked, downpicked riffs is control made audible, the oppressor’s and the resistance’s at once, and the record ends with the puppet turned destroyer.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record begins quietly, on a figure for acoustic guitars, and within its first minute the band overruns it. Battery sets the terms of everything after: a calm that will not be allowed to last, and a force that arrives as discipline rather than chaos. The rhythm guitar is downpicked at speed, every stroke struck the same way, so that the riff sounds machined. No song on the record is under five minutes, three run past eight, and those three take nearly half its length. A band whose music had been made for clubs and for tapes passed hand to hand opens its album for a major label with a song that announces control.
Elektra released the album in the United States in March 1986, and Music for Nations in the United Kingdom. It was produced by Metallica with Flemming Rasmussen and recorded at Sweet Silence Studios in Copenhagen late in 1985. James Hetfield plays rhythm guitar and sings, Lars Ulrich plays drums, Kirk Hammett lead guitar and Cliff Burton bass. It was the last record Burton made: he was killed in September 1986, when the band’s bus crashed in Sweden. Eight songs make about fifty-five minutes on two sides of nearly equal length; side one ends with Welcome Home (Sanitarium), and side two opens with Disposable Heroes.
The running order repeats, almost slot for slot, the band’s previous record, Ride the Lightning (1984): a fast opener with an acoustic introduction, a long title track second, a slow, heavy Lovecraft song third, a ballad that turns violent fourth, a long instrumental seventh, a fast closer. The record does not hide this. It takes a form the band had built two years before and fills it at greater length and with more command. Its achievement is not a turn but a consolidation, carried out at the highest level the form had reached, and much of what follows is the measure of how far command can go inside a known container.
Movement II
The title track is the centre, and the figure it builds governs the record. It runs past eight minutes. The verse and chorus hold at speed, and the drug speaks in the first person: the master is “pulling your strings”, and the addict hears his ruin as his own command. The sleeve has already drawn it, a field of white crosses on strings held by a pair of hands from above. A person made the instrument of what consumes him: that is the record’s finding, and it can be stated plainly.
Then the song stops. A clean middle section begins, two guitars in harmony over a slow figure, the warmest height on the record, and then a long lead. It is the addict’s moment of lucidity and longing, and it does not last: the main riff returns like the drug reclaiming the user. The clean section reuses the shape of the main figure, so that even the escape is built from the master’s material. Told as a ballad, the song would lose the grip it describes. Its form is the grip.
Around it the figure takes other faces. The Thing That Should Not Be, the third song, borrows from Lovecraft an elder god whose servants wait, and grinds slowly on one riff that restates its menace more than it develops it. Here the master becomes a monster out of a book, and the human servitudes of the rest of the record give way, for six minutes, to borrowed horror. It is weight without height, and it is the song the record could most easily lose.
Movement III
Side one ends in the madhouse. Sanitarium is the one place the record turns inward, and it is built as an ascent: clean, unsettled verses, then by stages a rise to a last section in double time. It is the best-made climb on the record, and its form is its subject. The inmate’s breaking out is the passage from clean verse to full force, heard rather than told.
The asylum has keepers, and so the master has another face: the institution that holds a person for his own good. The song joins the addict of the title track to the madman, and those two are the record’s inward songs, the only places where a mind is held from inside. Everywhere else the masters are seen from outside, as officers, preachers and gods, and their servants are seen as a crowd.
This is the record’s form at its fullest. Its knowledge is control, and it enacts control: riffs locked to the downstroke, tempo changes executed as commands, a band that never loosens even when it breaks into fury. A ballad that becomes violent was a form the band had used before. Here it is used with more patience and more height, and side one, which began with an assault and passed through the master, ends with a breakout from the madhouse.
Movement IV
Side two opens on the public form of the same servitude. Disposable Heroes runs past eight minutes and drives with real terror: a boy sent “back to the front” as stock, the officers spending him. Its verse cycle comes round once more than the argument needs, and still the song is required, because the soldier is the master and the puppet made into a state. Leper Messiah follows, the preacher on television and the flock that pays for its own blindness: the least made of the songs, its case stated close to slogan and its middle a change of riff more than a turn.
What these songs share is a structure more than a story. No one in them has a name or a place; the soldier is any soldier. The record reaches its archetype by abstraction, so its finding stays general, and the pleasure the music takes in force sits uneasily beside its critique of domination, a tension it does not examine. That is the plainest limit on what the record brings into the open, and it is a limit of the words more than of the sound.
The field it entered was heavy metal and thrash, a music of clubs and tape trading. With no radio play and no video, the band gave a major label eight long songs, and the record showed that thrash could carry long, composed forms, dynamic contrast and harmonic ambition without softening, at a level of execution the genre had not reached. It took thrash into the mainstream, set the standard against which the genre’s records of the following years were measured, and is commonly credited as a starting point for progressive metal. Little in it was invented that its predecessor had not begun; its force was perfection and scale.
Movement V
The seventh track is an instrumental past eight minutes, and the record’s breath. A march swells in, and at its centre Burton’s bass carries a slow melody with harmonised guitars above it, a grave, open beauty the record attempts nowhere else. It is the finest playing on the record, on the last record Burton made, and guitarists and composers have studied it for four decades. Its frame of marching riffs keeps it inside the record’s law: it is the same discipline as everything around it, turned to beauty.
Then Damage, Inc. Its quiet opening is overrun, as Battery’s was, and it is the fastest and most violent track on the record: the victim turned destroyer, servitude turned to revolt. It completes the sequence the sleeve set out, from the master’s assault to the puppet’s. It is also where the critique of violence becomes its celebration, and the record lets that strain stand. The two most distant things on it, Orion and Damage, Inc., obey one law, once as grave beauty and once as destruction.
Forty years have kept the record in print, the title track in broadcast and in the band’s concerts, and in 2022 it found a new young audience through a television series. Its sound is of its decade: the drum sound and the dry, compressed guitars are of the mid-1980s, and the bass sits low in the mix, a fault heard ever since. What it holds is a list of masters, the drug, the army, the preacher, the asylum and a god from a book, each one song’s subject, joined by one frame and met in no life; the family, labour, love and place are absent. Within that frame the record is whole: eight faces of one figure, and the last of them turning on the hand that held the strings.
Act III · The Twelve
Eight songs in about fifty-five minutes, and the subtractive test finds the parts mostly required. Battery must open, its terms set in the first minute as a classical-guitar figure gives way to the band. The title track is the centre and could sit nowhere else. Sanitarium is the one place the record turns inward, Disposable Heroes the public form of the same servitude, Orion the record’s breath, and Damage, Inc. its end in violence. The test bites twice: The Thing That Should Not Be restates its menace on one riff more than it develops it, and Leper Messiah’s middle is a change of riff more than a turn. Inside the long songs, sections repeat by the habit of the form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a person can be made the instrument of the thing that consumes him, and addiction, the army, the preacher and the asylum share one structure, a master who speaks in the victim’s own voice. The title track gives the drug the first person, the master “pulling your strings”, so that the addict hears his ruin as command. Disposable Heroes sends a boy “back to the front” as stock. The sound discloses as fully: the downpicked rhythm guitar is discipline turned to rage, control heard as the oppressor’s and the resistance’s at once. Held below the bar because the finding is general, close to slogan in Leper Messiah, and the record’s own pleasure in force goes unexamined.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is frequent and mostly of one temperature, the dreadful and the overwhelming. The title track’s clean middle section is the warmest height: two guitars in harmony over a slow figure, then the long lead, then the riff returning like the drug reclaiming the user. Sanitarium rises by stages from clean, unsettled verses to a last section in double time, the record’s best-made ascent. Orion is the summit of the other kind, a slow bass melody under harmonised guitars, grave and open, framed by a march that swells in and out. Battery’s turn to full force is a shock of power. The Thing That Should Not Be is weight without height, and the range of feeling at height is narrow.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Myth is built in one pattern and carried through the record: the master and the puppet, set out on the sleeve as white crosses on strings held from above. Each song is a new face of the same figure. The drug is a master; the elder god of The Thing That Should Not Be has servants who wait; the asylum has keepers; the officers spend the soldier; the false messiah keeps his flock; and in Damage, Inc. the victim becomes the destroyer. The pattern is load-bearing, and the order turns servitude into revolt. What holds it below the bar is the particular: Lovecraft’s monster is borrowed as atmosphere, no one has a name or a place, and the archetype is reached by abstraction, as allegory.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the band’s own. Kill ’Em All (1983) had joined the speed of punk and hardcore to the riffing and lead guitar of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Ride the Lightning (1984) had made the turn that matters here, to long, multi-section songs with acoustic introductions, harmonised leads, a ballad that breaks into fury, a Lovecraft song and an instrumental. This record takes that template almost slot for slot, at greater length and with more command. The stake was real: a band with no radio play and no video gave a major label eight long songs, one of them an instrumental past eight minutes. What holds it is the path: the form was proven, and the deal already signed.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. Its knowledge is control, and its form enacts control: riffs locked to the downstroke, tempo changes executed as commands, a band that never loosens. The title track is the clearest case. Verse and chorus hold at speed, the clean middle section gives the addict his moment of lucidity and longing, and the return of the riff is the master taking him back; told as a ballad, the song would lose the grip it describes. Sanitarium’s passage from clean verse to full force is the inmate breaking out. The sequence is counted here, once, from assault to revolt. The template is inherited, and two songs would say the same in another shape.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over forty years, and most of it formal. Guitarists and drummers have transcribed and studied the record for four decades; the downpicking of Battery and the title track is a standard of right-hand technique, and Orion is studied as composition, Burton’s part above all. The arrangements repay close listening: harmonised lines, counter-riffs under the solos, the title track’s clean section reusing the shape of the main figure. Each return finds more of the building. The semantic yield is thin. The words give on first hearing most of what they will ever give, and part of the return is ritual, a known object replayed at volume, and part is to Burton’s memory.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is heavy metal and its new extreme form, thrash, in the 1980s. The intrinsic force: the record showed that the speed and aggression of thrash could carry long, composed forms, dynamic contrast and harmonic ambition without softening, at a level of execution the genre had not reached. Little was invented here that Ride the Lightning had not begun; the force is the perfection and the scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record took thrash from the clubs and the tape-trading circuit into the mainstream without radio or video, set the standard against which the genre’s records of the following years were measured, and is commonly credited as a starting point for progressive metal. Its reach outside metal is narrower.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is weighed over forty years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, continuously in print and remastered. Presence is wide and continuous within its kind: the record has never left the catalogue, the title track is a fixture of rock broadcast and of the band’s concerts, and in 2022 it found a new young audience through a television series. That is very wide for a heavy record, but much of it is a genre’s presence, and popularity is presence, not proof of permanence. The fabric bears its year: the drum sound and the dry, compressed guitars are of the mid-1980s, and the bass sits low in the mix, a fault heard ever since.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing for most of the record. Hetfield’s rhythm guitar is the engine, downpicked at speed with a precision that makes the riffs sound machined, and the riffs are built with care, with counter-figures and shifts of accent. The arrangements are worked out section by section; the harmonised guitars of the title track’s middle and of Orion are cleanly voiced; Rasmussen’s production keeps a dense, fast record legible. Burton’s bass in Orion is the finest playing on the record. The faults fall on a share: the bass is buried elsewhere, Ulrich’s drumming serves without commanding, several solos run on stock figures, and the voice is a bark of narrow range.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One law governs the record: the will taken by a master, and the force of that taking, heard in one sound of locked riffs and controlled speed. The two most distant elements obey it. Orion, an instrumental with a slow bass melody at its centre, and Damage, Inc., the fastest and most violent track, are the same discipline, turned once to grave beauty and once to destruction, and Orion’s frame of marching riffs keeps it inside the law. The acoustic introductions obey too, each a calm that the band overruns. The range of form runs from ballad to instrumental to fast thrash. The law strains where the master becomes a monster from a book, and where the critique of violence becomes its celebration.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, in addiction and in madness, the record’s two inward songs. The state and war are held in Disposable Heroes, the soldier as expendable; religion and money in Leper Messiah; the institution in Sanitarium; the cosmic and the monstrous in The Thing That Should Not Be. One frame joins them, the master and the puppet. What holds the figure lowest: each order is one song’s subject, named more than held, and the orders meet in the frame, not in a life. The family, labour, love, the natural order, place and history are absent, and the orders held are all forms of domination, a list of masters.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, then The Inner Law at 8.7, and The Imperishable and The Made at 8.6. A record that carried thrash into long, composed forms and into the mainstream without radio or video; one law of control heard in every song, from a grave instrumental to the fastest track; forty years of continuous presence; and a rhythm guitar that makes the riffs sound machined.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: addiction, madness, war, religion, money and the institution are each one song’s subject, joined by a frame and met in no life, with the family, labour, love, place and history absent. Below the rest, The Swerve at 8.0, a template taken almost slot for slot from the band’s previous record; then The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 8.2, two songs that restate more than they develop, and a finding that holds but stays general.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met; the summit is withheld on the Epochal Gate, and the aggregate, at 8.4, stands below it as well.
Basis · Master of Puppets as released in March 1986 by Elektra in the United States and Music for Nations in the United Kingdom, eight tracks in their original order on two sides, about fifty-five minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording, its words and its reception, with no recording or lyric sheet in hand. The album is the unit; later remasters and the expanded reissue are evidence for its survival, not the object. Songs are cited by title, and words are quoted only where certain and never beyond four words. Running times are given only roughly. Facts that could not be verified, among them the day of release, who mixed the record, who painted the sleeve, the exact track timings and its place in a national registry of recordings, are not given.