Motionless In White covered Metallica's "My Friend Of Misery" way back in 2012 for the Kerrang! compilation Kerrang! Presents Metallica The Black Album Covered. Though if they had the chance to do another Metallica cover, Motionless In White vocalist Chris Motionless tells Radioactive MikeZ he'd love to tackle "The Shortest Straw" from …And Justice For All.
"I would absolutely do my favorite Metallica song ever, which is 'The Shortest Straw' from …And Justice For All. That is, in my opinion, one of the more angrier, if not the angriest Metallica song. I mean, the whole opinion is — in my opinion — their darkest, heaviest, most angry record. But that song, to me, just has some sort of aggressiveness that just sunk its teeth into me. It's my favorite, and I would love to cover it."
It's an interesting pick given it's one of Metallica's lesser-played songs from …And Justice For All live, though it's a good one! And kudos to Motionless In White too if they could pull it off – even Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett knows that album is insane.
"In the late '80s, the music culture kind of steered itself towards musical proficiency, and how proficient you were with your instrument, and how virtuosic you can be with your technique," said Hammett in a 2021 interview about the record and its technicality. "There was a lot of emphasis on that kind of thing, and there were a lot of instrumental albums being put out by a lot of guitar players that were super-successful.
"The showy bit of being in a band was kind of augmented by things like MTV and just being able to play your instrument. So I think that had a bit of an influence on us in terms of wanting to show people what we could do and how progressive we can be. Because after our album Master of Puppets, we thought, 'Wow, this is as technical as it gets.' And at that point in our musicality, it was about as technical as we could get, but we wanted to show people that we can even go further. And so, conceptually, that was what we were thinking in the songwriting.
"And the riffs, after touring on the Ozzy tour and then playing all those headline shows, we had started taking advantage of the fact that when you're on tour, the level of your playing ability is really high – playing at 100%, and all of a sudden, all these riffs are coming out. And we're experiencing that pretty much for the first time, writing riffs on tour because it's just what happens after a while. And so, a lot of the riffs that ended up on …And Justice for All were written on Master of Puppets, and the technicality of what we were doing on Master of Puppets, wanting to take that further, influenced how those riffs were written.
