Released: 1987
Tracks: Helpless; The Small Hours; The Wait; Crash Course in Brain Surgery; Last Caress/Green Hell
Best track: Helpless or Crash Course in Brain Surgery
Track to skip: none
You can hear the bass! Certainly a cause to celebrate being that it’s barely audible in the recordings after this EP. I don’t think this was anything pre-planned, but I’m guessing that the band felt they needed to re-ground themselves after losing Cliff Burton in a bus accident in 1986. I think they also knew the direction the next album (…And Justice for All) would take and probably felt that they needed to lighten things up a bit. Just as with the original “Garage Days Revisited” in 1984, they threw together this batch of covers to give some time before the next album and, in this case, to introduce the new guy in the group – bassist Jason Newstead. I think it’s a good introduction to Newstead and his style of bass playing. I mean, he’s not even in the same league as Cliff Burton and it’s pretty obvious that while they brought in someone who was clearly competent, he’s not an amazing technical force like Cliff was. He’s good, he’s solid and he does the job. I’m honestly just happy that you can hear him on this, because Lars and James completely buried him in the mix for Justice. We’ll get to that issue next time, though.
The EP starts off with a Diamond Head tune, Helpless, that’s possibly the best of the bunch. Lars does some great double-bass work on this song and it’s a lot of fun to listen to. Truthfully, all of these songs are fun. Some are pretty dark (The Wait, The Small Hours) and everything rocks hard on here, but the overwhelming feeling here is fun. I love the raw-ness on this album, how you can hear the buzzing of the amps and hands moving around the fretboard at various times. It’s not something they took overly serious and it’s clear how relaxed they were at these sessions. It literally sounds like they set up their gear, hit the record button, recorded a take live, and then went on to the next song. I love the carefully-produced stuff like Puppets & Justice, but I have to say it’s nice and refreshing to hear the band play like this.
The other 4 songs on the EP go through tracks by Holocaust, Killing Joke, Budgie & the Misfits (with a very short bastardization of Iron Maiden’s Run to the Hills at the very end). I think that Crash Course in Brain Surgery is another candidate for “best track” here, but in reality everything is good. The songs are tight, but also retain that loose quality. Overall, yeah, it’s a fun release and it provides a nice bit of levity after the loss of Cliff Burton. Not to mention before the brutality of the following release. This EP/CD has been out of print for many years, but thankfully the band included this in their “Garage Inc.” album that gathers all of the rare tracks they recorded over the years.
Rating: 85
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