Search - Cliff Em All (Jewel Case) on DVD

A great comp. from when Metallica was still good.

Amy | outer space | 09/03/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"In the early '90s I had an umpteenth-generation dubbed VHS copy of this and a friend of mine and I watched it nearly every single day. The videotape squeaked and never wanted to rewind fully. The sound quality deteriorated until you could only tell what song they were playing by watching closeups of their hands on the guitars. We didn't care, and continued to watch it every day anyway, so good is this video.

Now, after Load was released I think I actually went a full decade without listening to even one Metallica song, I was so disgruntled by it. I still haven't heard anything they've done after Load, but, you know, enough is enough. I've forgiven them, because there first few albums are still great. I still am depressed about the fact that, when ask people, "Do you remember when Metallica didn't suck?" people make me feel like a crusty old person. Many people do not remember. If they got this DVD, they could perhaps understand. Maybe it's the nostalgia value, but words cannot adequately convey my love of this compilation. It's mostly live clips but some humorous interview footage is also thrown in. (Interviewer asks how long the band has been together, James answers, "...since we started...")

As implied by the name, this is obviously all stuff from when Cliff was still around. (R.I.P., Cliff.) In case you're clueless, he's that tall, puffy cloud of hair with the Misfits tattoo, and of course it collects a good amount of bass solos.

Song choices are good and there is a clip of them covering "Am I Evil?" The video and sound quality varies, as some of this is bootleg video-sourced and other stuff was professionally-shot. But the fuzzy videos from the early days are still awesome due the amount of energy and the quality of the music, despite some quality problems and the fact that James doesn't sound great on some of the songs. Watching this, I can almost forget about Metallica's later stuff, and that is a good thing."