My Review: Metallica - Fade to Black

 My review

Metallica - Fade to Black

There is an edge, in the restless history of every theft, that can determine a pain as long as a path of aggression without a thermometer. A theft, yes, this very one, gave the spark to the first ballad of Thrash music, and to this day we still don't know who to thank for that gesture that risked driving James Hetfield to total self-destruction. They start from the most unexpected situations the delights that reach eternity: Fade to Black is the crying dissolved in the maternal acid of a teenager who, without his instrumentation, found himself measuring, calibrating, considering existence as a vertical multiplication and not a sum of banal everyday events. Teeth break, food (that life suddenly changed) slips whole within a spasm that cannot be reproduced. But here is the genius of the art of music: taking a madness and repeating it ad infinitum, in the macrocosm of an impetus with no possibility of consummation. Existence and death find a place to part, allowing one to take leave and the other to win, in the darkness of a terrible scene. 

A tremor reaches the lungs of an arpeggiating guitar, daughter from the Middle Ages that finds its own personal renaissance in the hands of James, only to sit beneath the despair allowing the second, Kirk Hammet's, to let the heartbreak fly up into the sky, where the desire for life has dissolved. A ballad that takes Metallica to the first moments of trashy hardcore intolerance, but that same section soon realised how much benefit would come from listening to it: killed the deception, destroyed the dream, the song celebrates the need to flex and reflect reality. When it seemed that only words could generate emotions, a portable testament within one's own conscience, here comes the vehement second part with rides in which the freshman Metallica returns to obey its own cliché, the one invented by the band itself. Everything splashes in the solo, Kirk exaggerating, taking his friend James' madness and representing it: they are voluminous details of a painting with the gift of melting in the chest. Lars, the viking who loves to complicate, succeeding very well at it, is the one who best renders the drumming a mixture of winds and claws, with his snares, his syncopated fingers linked to the explosion. Much has to be done to make this suicide, this depression, this mental daze believable, and all that remains is the dimension non-visible dimension to do so, because in every secret lies talent, as in the darkness, like that of Cliff's bass, a genius who here crumples, shakes his fingertips and lets the sweat from his hair fall onto his four strings to be lightning turned thunder. There is an intolerable amount of compactness between the words, a vomit that kills the blood entrances to the pericardium, and the music that seems to glue itself to them, to show a coherence, a tightness that crashes any chance of encountering even a single moment of light. James' voice is a mouldy cardboard, a list of unacceptable truths that turn (once the conviction is welded to the bond of memory conjugated to theft and its consequences) into a mental grating that drips down to his burning uvula. The mystery consists of the absolute desire not to hide those guitars full of lead while, embracing the lyrics, they put a boy's life against the wall: Fade to Black is a nocturnal performance, inside the volcano of spitefulness that, like ferocious insects, shakes the sky making it redden, because here a life leaves the path and goes to the place where breaths cannot access. Sadness, dutiful, consequential, falls within the watts of the American band, to be prey to the anguish, to the painful realisation that without it all joy would be safe of itself, feeding useless certainties. Fearful, lucid, dark, ethereal in being eternal, this suicidal bundle consoles those with the same motions becoming a consequent point of reference, a landing place, and a release from all illusions. One weeps, like fountains of a thrill in a state of perpetual hypnosis, and is shocked by the progression to wish to repeat the presence at the side of this track, as a magnet, rusty but still functional, brings us into its core, for an amorous encounter. Yes, loving: the courage to desire death is also an act of love. The fourth song on the album (it will be no coincidence that from Ride The Lightning onwards many ballads will be placed with this number), it is the one that is given a mission: to be able to convince the faithful and the novices that one can very well end the supply here, because if one went on it would only show a false attachment to life.

Confetti, torches, souls, progressions of rhythms, clashes of liquids swollen with fever, where vitality has a duty to step aside: it all looks like a sarcophagus, a precipice that must roll in the breaths, in the thoughts, until every attitude of opposition is completely dampened. FTB is a necessary ordeal, and it is precisely the last part, the one where the rhythm takes the train and splashes in, that makes us realise that certain notes, certain chord progressions are already the glacial breaths of a lifeless body. Unique in its disintegration of its own secret, death, the woman with the scythe, the end of existence (call it what you will), appeared almost in the mid-1980s to shake the delirious need for joy, to kill lightness, to slaughter millions of souls united in disengagement. All it takes is one theft, however, to realise how stunned one is without oneself, how losing the desire to live is a very quick act, with the motivation to pull any joy left in the hands of illusion by the hair. Having nothing left to give (sings James) is a truth married to a lie, for there are very few songs that can elevate desires to their own crashing giving. There is no effort at all to extol the precariousness of existence when certain events occur in adolescence. The guitars, the bass, the drums, are torches that illuminate the confusion that has waved goodbye and shouted its farewells loudly...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

31 Maggio 2023

https://open.spotify.com/track/5nekfiTN45vlxG0eNJQQye?si=06b82dc8d35d447d