...And Justice For All is one of my most favourite epic heavy metal albums, one of the few that truly deserve that tag and one of the fewer still that has any shred or modicum of coherence and/or thought.
Thank you.
P.S. Its title is inspired by the 1979 Al Pacino movie where he plays a lawyer who has to defend a corrupt judge who is accused of rape.
Synopsis from
http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=1:2201
"
Norman Jewison's blackly satirical look at the American justice system has gained in stature as one of the more incisive social commentaries of its time.
Al Pacino plays Arthur Kirkland, an incorruptible attorney who attempts to initiate reforms in the Maryland justice system. Kirkland is haunted by the fates of two past clients, one of whom committed suicide in jail; the other is still alive but is locked up on a trumped-up traffic violation. The ability of power and money to distort the pursuit of justice becomes all too clear as Kirkland finds out how deeply the rot has spread. He finally retaliates by representing a repulsive judge (
John Forsythe) accused of rape.
Pacino's and
Forsythe's performances are intense and powerful. Many critics found the film biting and almost painful in its razor-sharp indictment of the justice system, while others declared the script too outrageous."
Review from
Allmusicguide.com of Metallica's ...And Justice For All
"The most immediately noticeable aspect of
...And Justice for All isn't Metallica's still-growing compositional sophistication or the apocalyptic lyrical portrait of a society in decay. It's the weird, bone-dry production. The guitars buzz thinly, the drums click more than pound, and
Jason Newsted's bass is nearly inaudible. It's a shame that the cold, flat sound obscures some of the sonic details, because
...And Justice for All is Metallica's most complex, ambitious work; every song is an expanded suite, with only two of the nine tracks clocking in at under six minutes. It takes a while to sink in, but given time,
...And Justice for All reveals some of Metallica's best material. It also reveals the band's determination to pull out all the compositional stops, throwing in extra sections, odd-numbered time signatures, and dense webs of guitar arpeggios and harmonized leads. At times, it seems like they're doing it simply because they can; parts of the album lack direction and probably should have been trimmed for momentum's sake. Pacing-wise, the album again loosely follows the blueprint of
Ride the Lightning, though not as closely as
Master of Puppets. This time around, the fourth song — once again a ballad with a thrashy chorus and outro — gave the band one of the unlikeliest Top 40 singles in history; "One" was an instant metal classic, based on Dalton Trumbo's antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun and climaxing with a pulverizing machine-gun imitation. As a whole, opinions on
...And Justice for All remain somewhat divided: some think it's a slightly flawed masterpiece and the pinnacle of Metallica's progressive years; others see it as bloated and overambitious. Either interpretation can be readily supported, but the band had clearly taken this direction as far as it could. The difficulty of reproducing these songs in concert eventually convinced Metallica that it was time for an overhaul."