Ride the lightning

"Basically, in a nutshell, Metallica sounded like they could do anything. Heavy metal hadn't seen this kind of ambition since Judas Priest's late-'70s classics, and Ride the Lightning effectively rewrote the rule book for a generation of thrashers. If Kill 'Em All was the manifesto, Ride the Lightning was the revolution itself".

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"Ride the Lightning addresses capital punishment, death, suicide, and nuclear annihilation-basically, the array of concerns that would become metal's standard lexicon. Musically, the album represents the moment where thrash intersected with prog, thus raising the bar on technicality, structure, chops, and ambition ... This new expanded edition out-does the Kill 'Em All reissue with more live shows (including a 1985 Castle Donington appearance), the whole album's worth of demos and rough mixes and even more audio interviews, this time featuring Burton and Hammett. Again, though, the quality of the live recordings is spotty at best. The band trainwrecks right from note one, for example, on a March '85 rendition of "Fight Fire with Fire." There's a fine line between warts-and-all charm and embarrassing fiasco that should stay in the vault, and this collection all too often leans more toward the latter. Even in cases where Metallica's formidable live chops come across, thesoundquality leaves a lot to be desired. You have to think that if better-quality recordings existed from this time period, the band would have gotten its hands on them and released those instead".

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"Ride the Lightning (the deluxe version of which comes with a similarly dazzling array of extras) followed just a year later [of Kill 'em all], but heralded a huge leap forward musically. Recorded in drummer Lars Ulrich's native Denmark, it's the band's masterpiece, the tempos more varied, the songs more fully rounded and considered, the lyrics actually thought through this time".

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