Everyone has an opinion on Metallica. Including, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn, the members of Metallica. So when Lars Ulrich was recently asked to nominate one Metallica song that he never wants to hear again, the drummer didn’t hold back.
“There's a song called Eye Of The Beholder on the …[And] Justice [For All] album,” Ulrich told Vulture.com. “Wherever I hear that song, it sounds kind of like — I guess we don't want to be super-disrespectful to it — but it sounds really forced. It sounds like you put a square peg in a round hole. It sounds like it's got two different tempos. There's kind of a 4/4 feel in the intro and on the verses, and then I think the choruses are more like in a waltz tempo. It literally sounds like two different worlds rubbing up against each other. It sounds very awkward to me. I'm not a huge fan of that song.”
“I guess the asterisk is that, to me, we did the best we could each moment,” he adds. “Sometimes you sit down and go… ‘That could have been better’ or ‘That was a little awkward’ or ‘That feels a little silly or easy’ or ‘That feels over-thought-out’ or whatever. It goes back to that whole thing about the past is the past, and I don't spend a long time back there. And there's not really much I can do about it [laughs] and honestly, I don't listen to them. I don't listen to a lot of Metallica music. Part of it is because I'm sort of overly analytical. It's basically almost impossible for me to listen to a Metallica song without going, ‘Okay, how are the sonics, how's the mix, how does the guitar sound? The vocals are too loud, the bass is too boomy.’ It becomes this exercise in analytics. When you hear your favourite band — like if I listened to Rage Against The Machine or something, I just fucking let myself go. But when Metallica comes on it's like, Huh?”
In the same interview, Ulrich identifies the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts and AC/DC’s Phil Rudd as the two most underrated drummers in rock music.
“The amount of swing and bounce that each of them contributes to how you hear a Rolling Stones and an AC/DC song is completely unappreciated and unrecognised,” he says. “In terms of ‘air drumming moments’, you know, there are so many incredible ones from both of those guys.”
Metallica recently spoke to Metal Hammer about their enforced break from touring caused by James Hetfield re-entering rehab.
“Whenever something happens to a band member like this, it’s so deeply unsettling,” guitarist Kirk Hammett admitted. “It comes as a shock. You have to do a bit of scrambling just to cover some ground.”
