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Kill 'Em All is the debut album from this obscure Bay Area thrash band almost no one has heard of. I kid. At one time, Metallica was a proper thrash metal band that arguably brought the style out of the clubs and tape-trading scene and into the national spotlight starting with this slab of speed. Not happy with the direction of the LA scene where they started, Metallica moved north to San Francisco and found a legion of fans that loved how they took the sound of the NWOBHM and revved it up a hundredfold. You can hear that NWOBHM influence on the start of "Hit the Lights," which opens Kill 'Em All. Metallica lifted, very closely, the opening guitar and drum intro from Weapon's "Set the Stage Alight," one of the greatest metal songs to come out of the U.K. in the early '80s. After that, it's all Metallica's brand of speed and aggression. Songs like "Hit the Lights," "Motorbreath" and "Whiplash" set the minimum for how fast new bands had to play if they wanted to get in the game and started an ever-escalating battle of the bands, each trying to play faster than the next. Metallica's penchant for longer songs started here with the 7+ minute epic "The Four Horsemen," one of the best songs they ever wrote, and "Seek & Destroy" which is just short of the seven-minute mark. The songwriting does show the unevenness of a young band and for every "Whiplash," a song that makes you want to snap your neck as well as the neck of your air guitar, you have a "Metal Militia," which is kind of dull. But even the dull songs on Kill 'Em All had an undeniable and unrelenting energy which made this band difficult to ignore and their music so easy to get caught up in. It also marks the first time we got to hear Cliff Burton's bass playing. Cliff's ability to play both with and against the melody and more importantly, knowing when to do each, was a huge part of what made the first three Metallica records so special. He brought a measure of musicianship that few bands of the time possessed and that clearly helped make early Metallica so different other bands around at the time.

Kill 'Em All was nothing like most of us had ever heard before and that was a big part of what made it exciting. It was harder, heavier, and faster and you had to go on a kind of quest to locate a copy since it was originally released by Megaforce Records and the label did not have national distribution. Think what you want of the modern Metallica, but Kill 'Em All is an important record that changed the landscape of metal.