I am enslaved by my own self-imposed limits.  If this were the amps for Spinal Tap, I would transcend the limitations and crank the score up to 11, thus obliterating the structure I have established to review these albums.  But instead, I am relegated to giving what amounts to a perfect score in an imperfect system.

A pity, really.  Metallica's Master of Puppets is truly the greatest album the speed metal genre has ever birthed--it is regarded as the litmus test, the Platonic ideal, for speed metal perfection, not unlike the stature of Slayer's Reign in Blood in the thrash metal genre.  But what have I told you that you do not already know?

The question remains:  how did Metallica make the greatest speed metal album of all time, the equivalent of the homeric epic to classicists?  In short, there are two major ingredients, both of which deviated from the status quo of the various subgenres of heavy metal at the time:  first, playing a million miles per hour is not the only type of heavy, nor is it the most effective type of heaviness.  Nope.  Playing as fast as fuck only to stop on a dime--and to do this 300 times in the course of a single album--will wreck your neck and do a lot more damage.  However, Master of Puppets is often most powerful when it is most subtle.  Take, for example, the tranquility that interrupts the chaotic musical depiction of drug addiction in the title track, or Cliff Burton's beautiful basswork on the instrumental "Orion."  This juxtaposition of the heaviness with the softer interludes not only makes the heavy seem even more crushing and aggressive, but it also lends an eerie, ominous tone to the aforementioned breaks.

For the second ingredient to the unequaled success of Master of Puppets, the band seems to ask, "Why descend into the depths of hell for subject matter?" crafting homages to Satan and virgin sacrifice and satanic armies of metalheads overthrowing heaven, as tended to be commonplace during the day?  The scarier shit is up here, Metallica seems to be saying.  The devil wears leather and lipstick and listens to Motley Crue.

If you are a fan of metal, whether old or young, there is absolutely no excuse for not owning this record.  This I believe with utmost and unwavering seriousness.

Highlights:  Two of the all-time great anthems of mass destruction are the two bookends of this epic, "Battery" and "Damage, Inc." my all-time favorite Metallica song.  The H. P. Lovecraft inspired "The Thing That Should Not Be" is also rather menacing; I am glad that they wiped the dust off of that one and started playing it again on the last tour.

Lowlights:  Are you kidding?

Memorable Lyric:  "Cannot Kill the Family/Battery is Found in Me!" - "Battery."  Violence as a communal experience - like the Manson family, I suppose.

Interesting Fact:  Here's a funny practical joke we played on my Spanish teacher when I was a sophomore in high school.  We asked Sr. Padilla, the instructor, "Could we please listen to some music that we brought?"  He asked what kind of music we brought, and we answered, "Spanish music!"  He grinned.  I suppose he thought that he had made some sort of breakthrough with his students, and allowed us to play the tape.  The only problem-- for Sr. Padilla, not us--was that we had no Mariachi but only Metallica.  We bit our lips and held in our laughter as the opening strums of "Battery" kicked in - the soothing Spanish guitars seemed to lull our instructor into some type of nostalgic bliss.  Perhaps his mind was adrift with images of young, nubile senoritas frolicking on a beach somewhere.  Anyway, all was shot to hell when the heavy part kicked in; in fact, he sort of jerked in his chair.  But he wasn't so bad.  He let us play the tape a while longer, although he kept lowering the volume.  I think he finally hit stop after he figured, "Hey, there is no more Spanish music on this tape."