Metallica’s Master Of Puppets is a rite of passage for any young player building up their chops in metal guitar, and it is a punishing, unforgiving hellscape of down-picking that’ll fill your forearm full of lactic acid should there be any inefficiency in your technique.
Of course, don’t let that put you off. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions players have made it through the other side and lived to tell the tale. The pop-cultural high of its Stranger Things moment, when the bravura epic title track from Metallica’s imperious 1986 studio album was anywhere, everywhere all at once, has surely spread its appeal far and wide – dramatically increasing the number of players who can play it nose-to-tail, inside and out.
But can you really say you’ve mastered Master until you can play it backwards? Back-to-front? With sections flowing in order but – to borrow a term from Anthrax – the riffs and rhythm figures are following strict Efilnikufesinian logic and are played in reverse?
That’s the question. Well, one guitarist has done just that. Some readers will know him as a frontman/guitarist of English thrash stalwarts Evile, others for social media, and his name is Ol Drake. And he has turned Master Of Puppets inside out and shown us what that sounds like – and what it looks like.
It’s an interesting exercise. Sticking one’s head into a beehive might have been less traumatic experience than getting this one under the fingers but Drake has always had the chops for this sort of metal madness. It requires a certain amount of unlearning the original recording, and Kirk Hammett’s rhythm fill that introduces the verse rhythm figure becomes a considerably challenging cross-picking challenge.
How does this sound? Someone in the comments jokes that it sounds like Anthrax. And it does. It sounds like Metallica, too. Someone says it makes them feel like their having a stroke (which in the parlance of heavy metal, this is a compliment).
But maybe one commentator has got it right. As David ‘Davu’ Voiculescu of Romanian death metal sickos Rotheads suggests, ”Now do it with upstrokes only.”
Now we're talking...
If Drake is really going to commit to this inversion of Puppets, perhaps he should really commit and perform all of James Hetfield’s parts with upstrokes. That, just maybe, might be one of the days when sticking the head in a beehive looks more appealing.
Anyway, check it out above. Don’t try this at home. Or do! Just don’t blame us for the carpal tunnel. If you want to play the riff the conventional way, well, we've got a video for that too. See below. You can see more of Ol Drake's adventures in thrash guitar on Instagram.
