Here with the opening track of their 1986 debut album
Doomsday for the Deceiver is Phoenix, Arizona’s Flotsam and Jetsam.

The album was the first in history to receive 6 Ks from Kerrang Magazine (their version of a perfect score). Flotsam remains active to this day, though they are still best known as the band that bassist Jason Newsted left to join Metallica after the tragic accident that killed Cliff Burton in 1986. While all five band members share music credit for Doomsday, Newsted was the lead lyricist, solely writing all but three songs (for those he had co-writing credit).

Metallica’s 1991 self-titled album, best known as The Black Album, a record which has remained a sort of crossroads for the legendary hyper thrash/hyper progressive foursome, has for a long time been the best-selling album in the history of Nielsen Soundscan. Now, the record has become the first album to scan over 16 million units in SoundScan’s history.

The Black Album also holds the record for the most weeks spent on the Billboard 200 chart in the Nielsen SoundScan era, perched high up atop that vaunted spot for a mind-boggling 307 weeks and counting, as well as being the third-longest charted record in Billboard history. This distinction makes The Black Album only trail behind only two other seminal and influential records which hold the number one and two spot in that category — Pink Floyd’s sonic landmark Dark Side of the Moon and singer/songwriter Carole King’s emotional and complex pop music magnum opus Tapestry respectively. It’s also the sixth longest-charting album of any kind in Billboard history.

Classic Albums – Metallica: The Black Album
Netflix
DVD
Directed by Matthew Longfellow
Starring James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, Jason Newsted, Bob Rock
Eagle Rock Entertainment
Originally Released: November 06, 2001

With the buzz surrounding Metallica‘s upcoming movie, Through The Never, I thought I’d take a glance back at the band during a major turning point in their career that would see them go from heroes of the Thrash Metal scene, to a worldwide phenomenon. The Black Album became Metallica’s springboard to international recognition, propelling into the mainstream, an accomplishment that still largely divides fans to this day.

Prior to 1991, Metallica’s reputation was legendary among metalheads following underground movements. During the Eighties, as far as MTV was concerned, Heavy Metal was all glam and hair; with bands such as Ratt and Poison taking a front seat in the mayhem mainstream. But elsewhere, metalheads knew there was far more to the rapidly growing genre, and that there was more variety in the scene that involved less hairspray and less lipstick.

Back in January, we wrote about the first single and video from Newsted, former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted‘s new band, from their EP Metal.

Now, the band’s full debut album, titled Heavy Metal Music, will be released on August, 6, 2013. But in the meantime, Newsted himself is streaming the entire 11-song album online for free and you can listen to it in full here below!

In an interview Geeks of Doom did with Jason Newsted back in January on the eve of the EP’s release, we asked him about plans for a full album. Here’s what he told us…

Any of you out there old enough to remember a time when Metallica proclaimed that they would never make music videos? That was a long time ago, back before they did their first video for the song “One” off their 1988 album …And Justice For All (and what an awesome video it was). Since then, they’ve made plenty more, some of which we probably could have done without (“Until It Sleeps”?).

For St. Patrick’s Day in 1999, Metallica released the music video for their cover of Irish rockers Thin Lizzy’s rendition of the Irish traditional tune “Whiskey in the Jar.” The song was one of 27 tracks off the band’s cover album, Garage Inc., and went on to earn Metallica a Grammy in 2000 for Best Hard Rock Performance. The video for “Whiskey in the Jar” features the members of Metallica — including Jason Newsted on bass — performing as the band at a rowdy all-female house party.

Watch the Metallica “Whiskey in the Jar” video here below.