Customer Reviews

Fade to Bluegrass Vol. 2: Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica

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"Fade to Bluegrass Volume II: The Bluegrass Tribute to Metallica" is, by any account, a very well-done experiment into the musical reassignment craze going around these days. Taking the hard, energetic, fast metal of one of the most well-known musical acts ever, and translating them to a slower, pluckier form of music known as Bluegrass.

Where "Fade to Bluegrass Volume II" succeeds is in breathing some new life into some slightly-aged tracks from 10+ years ago in some cases, as well as giving a new face to more recent tracks that might've been passed over because of the album they were on. But, where "Fade to Bluegrass Volume II" fails is in its grace; the original "Fade to Bluegrass" album is an all-time favorite of mine, and the tracks on it were not only well-done, but changed to bring familiarity and freshness to them, whereas a few of the tracks on Volume II feel... alien. A good example being the track "To Live is to Die". Originally a sweeping, epic, sorrow-filled song in rememberance of fallen bassist Cliff Burton, the version found on this Bluegrass translation is a short, under-four-minute li'l ditty with the once-spoken verse now being sung the whole way through. And while this does what the album sets out to do - takes these songs and give a new spin on them - it ends up hurting more than helping, as the original and translated versions bear little semblance to each other, and therefore hurting the overall feel of the product.

Most of this album is very, very good. But, there's just something lacking in this Volume that was present in the first. It's very difficult to put it in words, it's something aural, perhaps the feel that perhaps a couple of these tracks were rushed through without putting enough consideration into how to turn them from pounding metal to plucking bluegrass, and leaving the end result with a bit more to be desired.

If you like either Bluegrass or Metallica, you will love this cd. It is just as good, if not better than the first volume. All the songs are good, but my favorite has to be the rendition of "Welcome Home (Sanitarium).

Even the burnt out songs you hear on the radio that Metallica does have been revitalized in this tribute. Pretty much every song on here is like a bad ass reworking of the original. If you like Metallica, bluegrass, and/or have an open mind to good music I recommend this album highly.

This is supply-side economics runamok.

The only downside here is that CMH didn't use a larger sample size to test the theory. They should have pressed 6.5 billion of these, one for every man, woman, and child on the planet.

Although the sales would have still been ZERO, they would have given much entertainment to all the poor folks in Africa. True, you can't eat a CD, but they can be used for things like, killing ants (via sun reflection), battlefield signaling (via sun reflection), palm tanning (again, via sun reflection), etc. Of course one could actually play them in a CD player, but why chance burning up the motors in a perfectly good CD player?

All kidding aside, the musicians are decent, and the singing isn't bad, but when is CMH going to wake up and start producing BLUEGRASS AGAIN? I mean, PLEEEEEASE---METALLICA? M-E-T-A-L-L-I-C-A ?!