Metallica Vinyl Club #7

Metallica recently announced that their fourth release in their Vinyl Club subscription would not be come out until sometime in early 2023. Vinyl production delays have just made things too unstable for the band to continue with any confidence with the subscription. It was sad news, as I really liked the surprise of what the band was going to release... plus everything was such great quality. It was a real treat. Oh well, as things wind down, I did receive the third release for 2022.

Metallica does seem to love fucking around with acoustic renditions for their songs. They already gave us the acoustic Blackened 2020 record in the Vinyl Club earlier this year, and this time around they drop four songs on us from their set at the Bridge School Benefit in 1997. I've always enjoyed the acoustic Metallica sets, in fact I purchased the official bootleg CD of their Musicares Benefit from 2014 so that I could own their amazing covers of When A Blind Man Cries and Diary Of A Madman in a physical format, so I was hoping for something cool an unique with this Bridge School set as well.

As enjoyable as this record is, it doesn't really offer anything super new. Sure it is kind of cool to have live versions of Low Man's Lyric and Poor Twisted Me, but they were already close enough to the acoustic format, so these versions aren't a great stretch of the imagination. Fade To Black is kind of a metal ballad, so even that song doesn't really push any boundaries... and then The Four Horsemen is a bit different, but the band kind of lose the thread of the song near the end and it just kind of collapses in on itself. I think that this performance was Metallica's first foray into the acoustic set, so they were playing things a bit conservatively (although their cover of Helpless from this set sounds good, and it would have been cool to see it included here). Still, this is a nice fit in the Metallica's Vinyl Club.

Nice packaging as usual with the Vinyl Club releases. Great looking cover and some writing from Lars about the show. Typically, there is an extra insert of some kind, but this time around, the band decided to forgo the cost of a special bonus item and make a donation to the Bridge School.