Disco de Metallica: “Six Feet Down Under”

If people would actually READ the information on Metallica's own website, you would know that they said it was poor bootleg quality. Actually it is not all that bad (in quality), have you ever heard a live boot from the '60's or '70's? Some people out there are spoiled. Even some of Metallica's own early archives are poorer sounding than these. This was supposed to be a limited release only in Australia and New Zealand and direct from Metallica. It looks like they also made it to Amazon and other retailers. In any case, it has some pretty cool songs on it.

I thought it would be a better recording. There are about two songs worth keeping on this disc. I was disappointed

The sound quality is not as good for the mostpart as part 2 particularly in Through The Never, but I really don't mind. It's not horrible sounding by any means, but I listen to tons of bootlegs shows from both Thin Lizzy and Metallica, so I'm quite accustomed to the raw sound quality of a boot, and I think this sounds quite good. It's a limited edition EP put out for Australia, not just a simple cash in people. I quite enjoyed it.

A lot of bands put out tour EPs and the like. I have some laying around by KISS and Aerosmith somewhere in an old box that I have in storage somewhere. It's not a new marketing tool. But what is a little different here is that a band the size of Metallica have sourced a bunch of songs from the bootleg recordings of fans and tidied them up as much as possible and then released them as the tour EP. Now normally these sort of releases stay in their home territory but when you are the size of this lot there will be a demand for this release world wide. So, what do we get?

Well truth be told the recording quality IS as bad as everyone is saying. Those giving this 5 stars perhaps need to look up 'objective' in the dictionary. Reminds me of a mate who is so into Metallica he blithely labels everything they do 'brilliant' - which became downright embarrasing when he declared each of the Loads in succession and then later St Anger 'brilliant' to me over the phone. But I digress overmuch - the simple upshot is that yes a bunch of the tracks here are ruined by horrid recordings. But this must be tempered by the fact that this is still a kinda cool idea that the boys have come up with and followed through on. And as a number of the songs come from band archives they are of better audio quality

Personally it would depend on what price you can get this for in terms of me recommending it to you. Would I pay full price for it? No. And from the looks of things the initial release was on import only in the US and that pushed up the price too far for what you are getting. Being from Australia however I was able to get it for much less and wihle I'm not a total diehard fan of this band I found the quirkiness of the release made up in some small part for the horrid recordings. Though as a final thought for those undecided - you do already own all these songs don't you? I mean you've listened to a lot of them enough times to know how they go huh? So it's up to you to decide if you need them all over again...

This is a great compilation of live bootlegs from Austrailia between '89 and '04. Here's the catch, the first 6 are FAN TAPED BOOTLEGS! Don't think you're buying a typical live album. The last 2 songs are form the LiveMetallica collection you can find online (you figure out where). They sound much better, but the LiveMet bootlegs have gotten 100 times better since '04.

If you're a hard core fan, collector etc, then this is for you. If this is your first Metallica album, you should probably pass.

To me, this is the modern day audio companion to the Cliff 'Em All DVD. (A video of all fan recorded bootlegs from the early days featuring Cliff Burton on bass)