Metallica’s final “real” work is complex and confusing, not an album full of headbanging but of musical ideas. It’s hard to get into at first but it is absolutely one of their best efforts.

The album’s production is its biggest barrier. I’m not talking about the absent bass. You could delete the bass off 90% of metal albums ever made and nobody would know. I’m talking about the thin and trebly guitar tone, the clicky drums, and the dry nature of the overall sound. Where contemporaries are all “BEER! THRASH!!!” this is the equivalent of a heavy metal dissertation, presenting ideas to you via footnoted and cited Word documents.

The song everyone knows, “One” is maybe the worst track on here. The musical ideas are all there, but the production guts it. This sort of thing needs to sound massive and heart-wrenching, not as sterile as my pet cat. The album’s best moments are “Blackened,” title track, “Harvester of Sorrow”, “Dyers Eve” and the hugely underrated “Frayed Ends of Sanity”

The main creative wellspring the band was drawing from here seems to be progressive thrash legends Watchtower (Lars, it seems, was a fan of the band), and most of the songs are lengthy and benefit from repeated listens. The title track is very complex, the riffs keep on coming and coming, as if they’re being written by a man with six imaginations instead of the usual one. Justice sees Metallica ditching the last remnants of their motorbikes and leather aesthetic in favor of lots of social commentary. This is an album overflowing with things to say. “Eye of the Beholder” and “Shortest Straw” match socially conscious lyrics with riffwork more calculated and focused than ever before. Early Metallica was the brutal bludgeoning and thrashings of a crime of passion. These songs are completely pre-meditated.

“Frayed Ends” is an amazing achievement, throwing idea after idea at you, and look, the song doesn’t get lost! The final riffset is awesome, and it seems they only ended the track there to make room for the other songs. “Dyers Eve” abandons the longwindness that dominates most of the album and just spends five minutes ripping your arms off, beating you around the head with them, reattaching them to your lower esophagus, and sticking you with the surgeon’s bill (it has some very frank and personal lyrics from Hetfield about his childhood, too).

The album is not as good as Master of Puppets. I can’t say I am completely enthralled by “To Live is to Die”, but neither was I bored. Judging an epitaph by its entertainment value seems unpleasant, anyway. I mostly just appreciate how Metallica didn’t let Cliff Burton’s death become a footnote in the liner notes: they actually wrote him a song.

Justice is a paradox: a genre album that somehow doesn’t seem to belong to the genre. This is a metal album for nerds. Instead of raw aggression, Justice presents aggression filtered through a few levels of peer review.

This is the debut “album” by autistic internet superhero Chris-chan and his fictitious backing band of hedgehogs.

The tracks are songs by Britney Spears and other artists Chris enjoys. His sole creative contribution is to sing over them with new lyrics more relevent to his lonesome, girlfriend-free life. “So Need a Cute Girl” involves Chris shouting “WHY DO ALL THE JERKS GET ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS?!” and describing himself as a “virgin with rage” to the sound of The Backstreet Boys’ “I Want it That Way.”

Speaking of Chris’s voice, it is an acquired taste. You can listen here. As an aside, Chris says his voice sounds like Frank Sinatra’s.

If you’re a JERK, or a DANG DIRTY TROLL, or just someone looking to play KICK THE AUTISTIC, there’s lots of classic Chris-isms to enjoy. “Yellow is a Mellow Colour” makes just as much sense as the name implies. “La Cocina en La Casa de Casanova” (based off some Ricky Martin song) features lyrics about Chris getting action in everyone’s favourite place for erotic liaisons: the kitchen.

Chris’s musical tastes are a bit limited. All of the album’s songs are either a) ubiquitous mainstream pop hits, b) featured on the OSTs to Pokemon and Sonic the Hedgehog games. Thank God that Guitar Hero would soon hit stores, and Chris would be introduced to a huge library of classic rock songs…well, the ones that were featured on Guitar Hero, at least.

Chris is obviously proud of this album. I find it entertaining too. Unfortunately, it’s only about 25 minutes long. I would recommend that you rip the mp3s and copy them twice over on to a blank CD, for double the Chris goodness, but I won’t. That would infringe Chris’s copyright.

The 80s were a time of great songs and inconsistent albums. Songs like “Nothin’ but a Good Time” and “Youth Gone Wild” are anthems of the age…of all the ages. But when I actually sit down and listen to a Poison or Skid Row album in its entirety, I go skip… listen… skip… skip… listen… skip… skip… skip… listen…

The good news: Dr Feelgood contains songs called “Dr Feelgood” and “Kickstart My Heart.” These two songs are loaded with energy, great riffs, and massive hooks. Crue does nothing but kill on both of these tracks.

The bad news: Dr Feelgood contains nine songs that aren’t “Dr Feelgood” and “Kickstart my Heart.” I can’t remember too much about them. I think “She Goes Down” sounded a little like Aerosmith. Motley Crue sounds completely out to lunch on these songs, they’re just not that memorable or interesting. They kind of sit there, like heavy metal elevator music.

There’s a few ballads, too. Someday you might find yourself answering the $500,000 question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire: What is the most pleasurable out of these experiences? A) a firehose enema. B) getting your nutsack caught in a particle accelerator. C) a rhinocerous-administered prostate exam. D) a Motley Crue ballad. That’s a tough one. You might run out of time. I’d suggest calling a friend.

Sadly, this was an all too typical scenario in the 80s, where rockstars would turn out one or two really good songs, fool around for forty minutes, and snort the rest of the album advance straight up their nose. Motley Crue compensated a little by making their good songs REALLY good (lots of bands ditched the “good” and went straight to “commercial”) but you still can see a neglect for the album format.

They did this on the album before this, too. “Wild Side” and “Girls Girls Girls” will stay with me forever. The rest of the album doesn’t even exist so far as I’m concerned.

Were they to blame? I don’t think so. They are a band that catered for a certain audience, and that audience likely didn’t listen to vinyl records front to back and memorise every note. I posit that the average Crue fan circa 1990 knew only the big MTV hits. It doesn’t help that glam was one of the most overtly image-focused styles of music ever to exist. It was curiously like rap in that regard. Nevermind the music, playa. Tell me about all the gunshot wounds you got and all the blow you muled.

Anyway, Dr Feelgood has two amazing Crue classics and nine pieces of filler so unambiguous that you could stuff them inside your walls and save money on your heating bills.