For Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher, the iconic cover of Metallica's eponymous album, known as Black Albumis a real visual failure, although he considers this album a musical masterpiece. During an interview with The Break Down with Nath & JohnnyKelliher has expressed his fondness for album covers, explaining that, for him, they are an integral part of the musical experience.
The importance of album covers
At a time when Music was primarily listened to in physical format, cover art played a vital role in attracting fans to an album, creating a visual immersion that captured the essence of the music. For Kelliher, who grew up buying vinyl albums, an album cover should announce what the listener was going to find there, especially in the Rock and Metal genres.
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A direct criticism of Black Album
Although Kelliher grew up listening to Metallica and recognizes the quality of the album released in 1991, he remains perplexed by the lack of a more illustrated cover. According to him, the choice of only having a black cover with a barely visible snake does not do justice to the intense music hidden inside: “The Black Album — it’s a great record for me; I grew up with Metallica — but this cover? Incredible album, terrible cover. It’s just black.”
For Kelliher, this lack of visual expression is surprising, especially for such an iconic album.
An artistic approach assumed by Metallica
This minimalist choice of cover art was not just a coincidence for Metallica, however. Lars Ulrich explained in the documentary A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica that the band wanted to move away from the exuberance of 80s glam metal, drawing inspiration from the album's sober style Hello! of Status Quo. This black cover, breaking with the trends of the time, was to assert a more raw and minimalist identity for the group.
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