Gloriously hard as the album is, you can't miss Metallica's good-natured side
coming through. Among its charms, beside its floppily casual song endings, is that
the band doesn't even try to be inclusive, to tackle a different band in each track.
You will just have to hang in there for their obsessions with Diamond Head (four
tracks, from the same album), Discharge (two), Motorhead (four, including a
version of "Overkill" with a sloppy-as-hell missed cue) and the Misfits (three). An
acoustic Lynyrd Skynyrd track with a harmonica solo ("Tuesday's Gone")? A sicko,
dumb-as-a-stump Anti-Nowhere League song ("So What")? They're all acts of love.
My Rating: 8
Track list & Lyrics - Disc 1
Track list & Lyrics - Disc 2
Fan-voting of album's best song - Disc 1
Fan-voting of album's best song - Disc 2
Cover Art - Garage Inc
Cover Art - Garage Days Re-revisited (1987)
My notes/review:
Garage Days was re-released on November 24, 1998 as Garage Inc. (a 2-CD set)! The new Garage Days contains not only the 5 songs from the 1987 release, but will also contain "Am I Evil?" and "Blitzkrieg" from the Creeping Death Single as well as all other cover songs the band has done over the years (including the Motorhead-ache and my favorite, "So What"). Metallica has also recorded 11 new covers for the CD. They have released a music video for their cover of Bob Seger's "Turn the Page". This re-release is something the band had comtemplated for some time. One of the reasons for this re-release is to allow fans to get a good quality copies of the covers instead of being forced to buy cheap bootlegs (before buying this I only had many of the songs on tape). The entire album is very good, espescially the old covers. Many of the new cover songs are also good. I recomend getting it if you are a Metallica fan.
From Ben Ratliff of Rolling Stone:
A few songs released in 1984 ("Am I Evil?," "Blitzkrieg") first proclaimed Metallica's
goofy fandom for obscure British metal bands. Those tracks, as well as all of 1987's
Garage Days Re-Revisited EP, scattered B sides and eleven new covers make up the
band's new double-disc set, Garage Inc. It includes few obvious choices. Black
Sabbath's "Sabbra Cadabra," OK, but nearly a third of the album is an hommage to
what was once nerdily called NWOBHM (new wave of British heavy metal) -- bands
like Sweet Savage and Diamond Head. It was the fast, minimalist, needling
relay-riffing of those bands, as the liner notes from Rolling Stone senior editor
David Fricke explain, that were the primary influence on Metallica. Otherwise, good
for Metallica for intuiting that Nick Cave's "Loverman" sits somewhere on the
perimeter of metal (that baritone, that fall-of-man fixation), as does Bob Seger's
"Turn the Page" (that hair, that epic nihilistic gloom on the subject of tour-bus
depression).