1. Fight Fire With
Fire (Hetfield/Ulrich/Burton) [4:44] |
[
-- Lyrics -- ] |
| The first track on this classic
album. Acoustic guitar turns into a full-on thrash assault in this song of revenge and
Armageddon caused by a nuclear war, a common topic among metal bands of that era. |
|
2. Ride The
Lightning (Hetfield/Ulrich/Burton/Mustaine) [6:36] |
[
-- Lyrics
-- ] |
| The title track of this album, Ride
The Lightning is an epic that graphically details death by electrocution, written by
Lars, Jaymz, Cliff, and Dave, who has often said that he tried to teach Jaymz the song's
famous, intricate guitar break without success. |
|
3. For Whom The
Bell Tolls (Hetfield/Ulrich/Burton) [5:10]
|
[ -- Lyrics -- ] |
| For Whom The Bell
Tolls is a regular crowd-pleaser. Burtons original bass performance takes tells the
listener about a group of soldiers who fought on a hill but got killed by an airstrike.
The song was inspired by the movie with the same name. |
|
4. Fade To Black
(Hetfield/Ulrich/Burton/Hammet) [6:56] |
[
-- Lyrics
-- ] |
| The band's first ballad, Fade
To Black is about the grim contemplation and execution of suicide. Although
anti-final solution, the song has been singled out, with Ozzy Osbourne's "Suicide
Solution." The band maintains that they have received letters from fans who were
dissuaded from taking their lives by the song. |
|
5. Trapped Under Ice
(Hetfield/Ulrich/Hammett) [4:30] |
[
-- Lyrics
-- ] |
| This nightmarish epic uses a
person simultaneously drowning and freezing to death to symbolize a person living
zombie-like, burnt out and perhaps a drug addict |
|
6. Escape
(Hetfield/Ulrich/Hammett) [4:23] |
[
-- Lyrics --
] |
| Escape tells the story of
an escaped prisoner on the run which can also be interpretated as an escape from
everything which is preventing you from doing what you want to or even from beeing as you
want to be, it is the album's shortest song at 4:23, hinting at the style the band would
eventually embrace. |
|
7. Creeping Death
(Hetfield/Ulrich/Burton/Hammett) [6:36] |
[
-- Lyrics
-- ] |
Classic Metallica, although parts
of Creeping Death is borrowed from the rarely heard song "Dying By His
Hand." The song tells about the liberation of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. The
lyrics to Metallica's version are based on the film "The Ten Commandments" more
so than the Bible. Its been played live at alsmost every gig, and the
audience getting to scream 'Die, Die Die' somewhere in the middle of the
songs makes this one of the most populair live songs.
James: We demoed "Ride The Lightning" and one other song in the
studio before we recorded the album. So there's actually a demo somewhere of those three
songs with different lyrics. When we did the crunchy "Die by my hand" breakdown
part in the middle, I sat in the control room after we did the gang vocals, and everyone
was just going nuts! That was our first real big, chanting gang vocal thing - there was
almost some production value to it. That whole album was a big step for us. |
|
9. The Call of Ktulu
(Hetfield/Ulrich) [6:29] |
[
-- Lyrics
-- ] |
The second instrumental song
Metallica made, The Call of Ktulu is a classic. With lead bass by Cliff, the song
was inspired by the Necronomicon and H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The song was
originally called "When Hell Freezes Over.
In 2001 the S&M version of the song was nominated for a Grammy Award in Best
Rock Instrumental Performance. |
|
