The Crusade (2006)Does Not Sound Like Metallica
I understood it a little more at the time, but in 2024, it is still common and acceptable to refer to Trivium’s 2006 album The Crusade as, and I quote, “their best attempt at being Metallica-lite,” and as a fan of Trivium and a . . . “fan” of Metallica it’s always been a bit insulting.
Let’s address the primary issue upfront, yes, Trivium’s sound changed significantly in the transition from 2005’s Ascendancy, but if we approach the subject with any rigor, we can very quickly dismiss the idea that the primary difference is that they now “sound like Metallica.”
“Durante,” you ask, “if it doesn’t sound like Metallica, then why do people think it does? Are their ears lying to them?” The short answer is “yes.”
PERCEPTION IS REALITY, KID
First and foremost it must be acknowledged that yes, the heavy metal press at the time went out of their way to associate Trivium with Metallica, specifically as a comparison of commercial potential. These guys would be the next band that would blow up from the underground and establish themselves not just among metalheads, but potentially with regular rock fans as representatives of metal in the mainstream. And if you look at their charting history with Billboard, those predictions were largely correct. Those comparisons were first being made when Ascendancy was coming out, and that album peaked at the #151 spot, but The Crusade little more than a year later peaked at #25, and since that time they have never charted lower than the #23 spot. The problem with that comparison of course is that the Billboard charts mean less than they ever did. In 2008, the economy collapsed in the year that Trivium released possibly their best record, Shogun, and though the band is still without question a commercial success, there are telltale signs much like with Periphery that Trivium avoids having day jobs by being in a very popular band, and also hustling their asses off on the side when they’re not on the road. According to an article from 2015, their record Silence in The Snow charted with less than 10,000 sales. Frontman Matt Heafy has been brutally honest about the humility of the lifestyle he leads as the leader of, theoretically, one of metal’s most popular bands.
But I digress. Point being, this group was primed for backlash, immediately. Groups had become explosively popular in the mid and late-90’s that deviated from the sound of classic 80’s metal, but if my time on metal forums in the mid-2000’s is a worthwhile sample, the seemingly much worse thing to do was to have any hint of those influences at all while also, more or less, posing as a thrash metal band, posing as Metallica, who in the meantime have only continued to grow into a literally multi-billion dollar corporation, a major league sports team whose hiring of a new bassist included a million-dollar signing bonus in 2003 money. Whatever Metallica has lost in musical credibility as a recording act, as a live act they’ve yet to fade, playing a set that balances their most difficult and popular material to this very day in front of crowds of absolutely unbelievable size. If the phrase “metal gods” didn’t exist before the Judas Priest song, it would need to be coined to describe Metallica. They are worshiped.
Trivium is, at least at times, my favorite metal band, but I’d be lying to myself to say they’ve gotten anywhere close to that level. They headline festivals, but you know who doesn’t play festivals? Metallica, because they don’t have to.
MUSICAL AESTHETICS PRE-CRUSADE
But does the sound comparison have anything to do with the sound of the two groups? Well, yes, actually. 2005’s now-classic Ascendancy is easily described as a NWOAHM or Metalcore record with enough of a precision/technique bend that comparisons to late-80’s thrash are appropriate. You can hear this on the album’s opener, “Rain,” where the verses are centered on a classic, phrygian, galloping thrash riff, then the chorus switches it up to a regular minor pattern of plucky leads and big chords. The verse riff, however, is pure 80’s thrash, as opposed to being any contemporary variety of death metal, hardcore, etc, that is a thrash riff. I’d argue that thrash riffs and aesthetics are an even bigger element of their underrated debut record Ember to Inferno, whose “Fugue” has some of the most impressive downpicking I’ve ever heard on a record.
NOTEWORTHY SIMILARITIES
Before they ever released The Crusade, the influence of thrash was noteworthy, but in making that album the influence became even clearer. For one, the vast majority of vocals on Ascendancy are unclean, and this changed to being mostly clean, singing vocals. The band also changed their guitar tuning. Every song on Ascendancy is in “Dropped-D”, which, you probably know what that is, but for The Crusade they changed to standard tuning, peppering the album with the occasional bits of 7-string in standard tuning as well. Unclean vocals weren’t as prominent in the thrash era, and neither was the dropped-d tuning, so even before hearing any riffs, the band has gotten itself closer to what we might call the 80’s thrash aesthetic.
It is at this point we come to the only truly undeniable point of comparison between this record and the Metallica discography: Matt Heafy’s singing voice. The thrash metal affectations he took from Hetfield (and Chuck Billy, Blitz, etc) were a big adjustment, but it is undeniable that Heafy and Hetfield have a comparable bark, especially when comparing 2006 Matt Heafy to the Hetfield voice of 1986 and 1988. Here we acknowledge my arguments greatest weakness, which is that Matt Heafy’s 2006-era clean signing voice is, of course, all over this record. I’ll return to this, because the truth is that even for the similarities in certain deliveries, there are simply things Matt Heafy does with his voice that not only does James Hetfield not do, but is also incapable of doing.
Before we return to that, we’re going to do what I really came here to do. We’re going to talk about riffs. The tuning of the guitars? I’ll give you that, that’s closer to Metallica than not just what Trivium were doing, but what most bands were doing. The voice? Similar, and likely used as a source of inspiration for a Matt Heafy who wasn’t quite sure how to approach “aggressive” singing. (Moreover, Matt Heafy probably took most of his lessons in how to sing metal by singing Metallica songs, I’m sure he’d freely admit this.)
TEACH YOUR EARS, OR I WILL TEACH THEM FOR YOU
From a songwriting perspective there is absolutely zero comparison to be drawn between these two bands unless your standard of comparison is one I would find highly suspect. These are two bands that play aggressive, fast music, played mostly at concert pitch, and at some fundamental level rooted in western harmony. Aside from that, the two groups are mostly dissimilar, and if we need points of direct comparison for Trivium’s riffs, it’s significantly easier to find those comparisons with bands that aren’t Metallica. If your perception of this record since its release has been that The Crusade is some sort of weak attempt at sounding like Metallica, please, listen to what I have to say, because this is one of my favorite metal albums and I think it deserves a serious second look after being haunted by one of the worst memes in metal of the past 20 years.
ALBUM STRUCTURE AND LENGTH
But wait! I forgot that there’s actually more to talk about before we talk about any actual music, because now we need to talk about album structure, and I think on a macro scale, this is the biggest contrast you can draw between The Crusade and any classic Metallica record.
In particular, on their three most beloved albums within the metal community, Metallica developed an album structure for Ride The Lightning which they then basically repeated for both Master of Puppets as well as And Justice For All, the albums that represent their broadly-agreed-upon creative peak as well as most influential material by a huge distance. (At least on metal groups, given that The Black Album has been an outsized influence on radio rock from its release to this very day.)
Side A
Track 1: Grand intro gives way to furious opener.
Track 2: Title track, usually a multi-part epic.
Track 3: Mid-tempo song with weirder ideas developing over the course.
Track 4: Ballad which becomes a rocker.
Side B
Track 5: “Uh . . .”
Track 6: “Hrmm . . .”
Track 7: “I guess we should have an instrumental here?”
Track 8: “Look just put in a mosh-pit song and let’s go home.” (You can switch track 7 and 8 for Ride The Lightning)
If you wanted to sound like Metallica, I cannot imagine an easier route than to borrow their approach to album structure, especially since that strength of album structure has consistently distracted from their weakness of bloat. (Don’t you dare try to tell me that “Leper Messiah” is a good song.)
The Crusade doesn’t look like a classic Metallica album at all. For one, it has 13 songs, not 8. In theory this would lead one to believe that the Metallica albums are leaner and more focused, but take a look at song lengths. Even though there are a combined 25 songs on Metallica’s last three albums of the 80’s, those albums got longer and longer, going from 47:25 (5.9 minutes per song on average), to 54:47 (6.8 minutes per song), to 65:24 (7.3 minutes per song) as individual songs became longer and longer. (And more tiresome.)
The Crusade has 13 tracks, but the total track listing comes in at 57:25 (4.4 minutes per song, far more taut than any classic-era Metallica record). In the time it takes Metallica to mind numbingly riff-repeat their way through a track like “Disposable Heroes” (a track that serves as a horrifying omen of the sort of bloated nonsense they put out these days) Trivium will have begun and finished two songs on The Crusade. Thus, we can conclude that not only does Trivium not borrow Metallica’s album structure, but that they don’t in large part because their songs do not slot in as easily to that type of structure, and because they don’t write the same kinds of songs.
Before we even address the actual sonic dissimilarities between the two groups, of which there are basically infinite if you have actual ears and even the beginnings of a musical education, structural comparisons between The Crusade and peak-era Metallica disqualify the comparison. “Ignition” doesn’t swell, it hits the ground running, before segueing directly into “Dentonation,” the two tracks forming something more comparable to one of the early two-part Megadeth epics than anything Metallica did. (“Good Mourning/Black Friday” and “Holy Wars . . . The Punishment Due,” obviously.) “Entrance of The Conflagration” is, of course, not the title track, but it’s also a speedy thrasher with a fairly straightforward structure. “Anthem (We Are The Fire)” is an upbeat track at a spot in the album where Metallica would usually put the ballad. That doesn’t show up in the form of the sludgy and really more nu-metal downtempo number “And Sadness Will Sear” until the band has already put another thrasher behind them in “Unrepentant.” It’s here at the exact mid-point of the album where the band puts their most “epic” or “progressive” track, “Becoming The Dragon,” which goes through various permutations, in a spot that Metallica would reserve for one of the more nondescript thrashers. By contrast, “Becoming The Dragon” would likely be in the spot of a track 2, where they tended to put the longest and most ambitious vocal tracks. What follows is the album’s fastest and most straightforwardly aggressive track, “To the Rats,” the sort of song that Metallica made a point of putting right near the end or at the end of their classic records. The only 80’s Metallica song you could compare “The World Can’t Tear Us Apart” to is “Escape,” and it is at this point that we finally have a note of comparison since it shows up at about the 3/4 point of the record in roughly the same spot “Escape” arrived at on Ride the Lightning, which would be a great comparison aside from the fact that the comparison between the two songs is already a stretch and also Metallica hates “Escape” as previously noted.
To even continue this structural analysis through the back half of the record would be mentally backbreaking given that “Tread the Floods,” “Contempt Breeds Contamination,” and the somewhat-infamous “The Rising” are distinctly un-Metallica. It suffices to say that it is indeed somewhat Metallica to put the instrumental closer title track at the end of the record, and I will say that there is a valid comparison to be made between that song and the classic Metallica instrumentals, namely that rather than being a song that simply lacks vocals that song really is a progressive journey through different textures and moods that is truly meant to emphasize their individual musicianship.
But it goes without re-explaining that the entire rest of the record is not structured in even remotely comparable a fashion to 80’s Metallica.
KEY SIGNATURES
And now we arrive. If I were 14 and you asked me about . . . And Justice For All I’d call it a forward-looking progressive metal album, and today I wouldn’t call it much more than an experience comparable to church: lengths of intense boredom punctuated with strange, heavy moments of real emotion. Metallica stands uniquely among 80’s metal bands in that they wrote fucking long songs and they did it all the time. In a final analysis, it’s hard not to say Metallica were masters of a substyle in thrash that nobody else ever really tried (in the 80s or in the genre’s mid-2000’s revival), which for simplicity’s sake we’re going to call “epic” thrash, and I call it that because the most famous 80’s Metallica songs are also the ones that stylistically set them apart from any of their genre contemporaries. Nobody else in the 80’s wrote songs like “Creeping Death”, or “Master of Puppets”, or “Blackened.” Most of the rest of the 80s thrash movement, with the notable exception of Heathen, used straightforward diatonic melody and harmony at the level Metallica did. But I’ll be god-damned if Metallica didn’t eventually try to make that every song, regardless of whether it fit the riffs they’d written, just by stretching the lengths of the songs.
Every fucking Metallica song is in the same fucking key, I swear to fucking god they are fucking cavemen. Of the 25 songs on Metallica studio albums between 1984 and 1988, a staggering 21 of them are either composed entirely or mostly in the key of E minor, with the 3 exceptions being “Escape”, “Call of Ktulu” from Ride The Lightning (a song whose primary motif bears a striking resemblance to Megadeth’s “Hanger 18,” something Dave Mustaine will be happy to tell you,) and the track “To Live Is To Die” from And Justice For All which barely made the list, a song that is also functionally an instrumental and serves mostly that function on its record. That’s 84% of their songs in their classic era. “Escape” also comes with a massive asterisk because apparently, that song was forced onto the record by the band’s label, the band have only ever performed the song live once, when they were playing the album in its entirety, and they’ve said openly they hate it. It’s really telling because “Escape” is a breath of fresh air on an album that could really use one going into its final stretch, and the lack of that dynamism on Master of Puppets in particular ages that album really badly. Not a single song on that record lacks a significant portion in E minor. I’m not here to tell you it’s a bad record, but be serious with me, at 55 minutes long, is it really warranted to include “The Thing That Should Not Be” or especially “Leper Messiah”? And could we not easily cut down a significant portion of “Disposable Heroes” as well? This only got worse on And Justice For All, an album I admittedly prefer for its unintentionally more avant-garde approach, an album that in a weird way predates the mind-numbing, pseudo-minimalistic repetitiveness of their most hated (and most interesting) records, St. Anger and Lulu.
It’s not just that all of these songs are in the same key, it’s because they’re in the same key that they all have generally the same vibe and invoke the same type of response. There’s an undeniable chunkiness to the low E string, and having a low open string to bounce off of gives you a lot of freedom to do some BS on the fretboard of almost any variety before pumping away again at that open string. Much like the album structure, by the time the band recorded Justice their songwriting itself had also become formulaic, and the band had gotten far too interested in its own recursive identity as the most Metal band that ever Metaled in all of Metaldom.
Which begs the question: is the Black Album a serious improvement? Honestly, yes, the songs are significantly better in almost every way, but I can also be more subtle about this. Even though this album and its songs have been run into the ground by radio play, returning to the album now it’s hard to deny that it brought a much-needed dynamism back to Metallica’s songwriting that hadn’t existed since Kill ’Em All (when Dave Mustaine was writing songs for them, which is not a fucking coincidence.) They even exploit largely the same structure to the opening four songs as on their previous records, with the first having a swell into an opener, and the fourth song being a ballad, but of course “Enter Sandman” and “The Unforgiven” are totally unlike anything before. Not to mention that, of course, mostly because Bob Rock insisted on it, “Sad But True” is in D minor as a result of the band, downtuning their guitars to avoid having another song in E minor.
Before I hop off of this though, seriously, Metallica: stop. There are other strings on the guitar. For Load and Reload the band tuned to Eb standard and then virtually every song they played on those records was in Eb. Almost every song on St. Anger is in C minor aside from “Invisible Kid” which is detuned even further and is once again based on the lowest open note.
Let’s do a quick comparison to Trivium’s The Crusade, now that I’ve hopefully convinced you that Metallica only understands how to write songs based on the minor key center of the lowest open string.
“Ignition” bounces quickly between Gm and Em until a chorus in Am, with a solo section Dm, then loops back. “Detonation” has a verse riff that’s almost polytonal between Em and D#m, and a smattering of riffs that questionably follow Em until a furious speed thrash section focusing Em, and a closing section plainly in F#m. It isn’t until “Entrance of The Conflagration” that we even get a song in a consistent key center (Em), and even then, once again they create a section in its own key for a guitar duel (Am). In a cool bit of continuity, the next song “Anthem (Resound The Fire)” is structured in a similar manner to the solo section of “Entrance,” and it almost goes the entire song without shifting from Am, but alas, they do slide up to Bm for Heafy’s “response” solo after Beaulieu plays in Am first. “Unrepentant” is technically the first song on the record to not change keys/scales if you consider its clever structural trick of playing F# phrygian and sliding up to Bm, which is, in fact, the same scale, just different modes of the same scale. “And Sadness Will Sear” plays off more or less the same scalar relationship, but with the extra beef of the 7th string the timbre changes entirely, and also it’s basically a power ballad by way of Korn’s “Freak on A Leash.” “Becoming The Dragon” can be clearly identified as the first and as of yet only song to be composed in the key of Em entirely, even the mid-song shift shift down to B phyrgian feels more like an extended chord vamp for a breakdown than even a modal shift in the spirit of “Unrepentant.” “To The Rats” then follows with a shift between B phrygian and D minor, which is a dramatic and yet smooth key change due to the closeness of these scales in the circle of fifths. “This World Can’t Tear Us Apart” is mostly in C#m and ope, there’s definitely a distinct pattern here, a key shift, once again a shift close on the circle of fifths, to F#m, specifically to highlight a lead section. “Tread The Floods” is as close to plainly tonal as any song on this album gets, shifting between G phyrgian and G minor, which is also technically a “one-five” relationship but I guarantee this is absolutely not how any metal guitarist thinks of it except me. “Contempt Breeds Contamination” changes between many tonal centers, as does closer “The Crusade.” (Which, admittedly, was not entirely uncommon to Metallica’s instrumentals or ballads in the 80’s.) I assume by now you get the idea.
So I think it’s safe to say that even without aggressively investigating the true meat of these guitar riffs that I’ve made a strong argument here, whether you agree or not, that The Crusade is not structured like a classic Metallica record, and the structure alone can be explained away purely by comparing the amount of songs versus the length of the songs. Trivium write shorter songs than Metallica, and exist in an era where the average album is expected to be longer than in the late-vinyl, early-CD era when Metallica released their classics. Thus, it can be argued in consequence that the reason Trivium’s The Crusade is not structured like a classic Metallica record is that they don’t write the sort of songs, structurally, that would fit on a classic Metallica record.
However, by digging a little deeper into the variety of key signatures employed by the two groups, we can also find out that the typical Trivium song on The Crusade is literally outside of the tonal range used on most classic Metallica songs, and they also use a wider variety of melodic and harmonic approaches, largely because they incorporate a wide body of influences outside of their thrash metal core, notably the non-muted tremolo picking atonalism of death metal (“Ignition”), shimmering full chord voicings of black metal (“Entrance of The Conflagration”), the diatonic anthemic sounds of 80s euro metal and hair metal (it’s all over this thing but most especially on “Anthem”), the sludge and atmospherics of nu-metal (“And Sadness Will Sear”), and on, and on.
I COMPLETELY FORGOT TO TALK ABOUT THE VOCALS
So yeah, after I finally hit “publish” on this thing I realized I forgot to compare Matt Heafy and 80’s James Hetfield as singers. Honestly, my point’s already been made, so I’ll keep this short and sweet. In terms of delivery, there are a lot of similarities.
In terms of the skill level? Heafy flatly embarrasses 80’s Hetfield. The Hetfield of the 90s and onward would become a soulful, country-tinged voice as he began to more openly express himself, best exemplified in the harmonies of tracks like “Until It Sleeps” and “Unforgiven II” from the Load era, but the Hetfield of the 80s was a remarkably limited, remarkably unskilled, if compelling vocalist. By comparison, the Matt Heafy of 2006 slathers The Crusade in layers of vocal harmony the kinds of which put even most of the rest of their own output to shame. The choral intro of “Conflagration,” and the intoxicating layers of moments like “Swim through our sins of suffering” from “Becoming the Dragon” that’s executed in a similar fashion on tracks like “To the Rats” is unique to this record amongst both the Metallica and Trivium discographies. Heafy’s “lead” vocal texture may be notably similar to the young Hetfield, but the other ways he uses his clean voice for backup vocals on this record leave no serious comparison, and that’s not even to mention the smatterings of harsh death metal vocals.
And one more thing before we wrap up.
HEAFY AND BEAULIEU PLAY CIRCLES AROUND HETFIELD AND HAMMETT
And Metallica would happily tell you that! The Hetfield of the 80s was a laser precise and for-the-era top-tier technician as a rhythm guitarist who had a distinct and lovely compositional approach as a lead player that was as untechnical as his rhythm playing was technical. Kirk Hammett was a chaotic and frankly often sloppy (not a derogatory comment) player whose solos revolved around blues rock, pentatonic fundamentals. Heafy and Beaulieu, on the other hand, are both wildly proficient players above the twelfth fret and spend much of this record attempting to one-up each other technically, playing with absurdly clean execution that, even when it does reflect the pentatonic approach of a Hammett (such as on Heafy’s duel-closing solo from “Conflagration”) is simply played too fast and too cleanly to be compared, not to mention that both players heavily incorporate sweep-picked arpeggios and fast minor scale runs, the sorts of which have never been heard and will never be heard on a Metallica record.
ANYWAYS. . .
All of this leads to one inescapable truth.
If you think The Crusade sounds like Metallica? You’re giving Metallica way too much credit.
