Overview – Enter Sandman, the second music video ever released by Metallica, comes off of their fifth record, The Black Album, and focuses on the story of a boy and his nightmares. The song itself would have to be one of Metallica’s best known songs because of all the airplay it received from various radio and television stations. The sound of the song is a lot more commercial, although still not to an extreme extent, than their songs from the previous four records of Kill ‘Em All, Ride The Lightning, Master Of Puppets, and …And Justice For All. I’m sure that the Metallica fans who were upset with Metallica releasing a video for One were even more enraged by the band choosing to release a video for this song, along with the other videos they released for other singles of The Black Album. I’m personally not a fan who thinks that The Black Album was genius but at the same time, I don’t criticize Metallica for releasing it, as a lot of the music on it is still
pretty good.

The Song – I personally have become a bit jaded to Enter Sandman just because of how much it gets played on the radio and how often Metallica performs it live, I can’t think of the last show they did where they actually didn’t play Enter Sandman. This aside, the song itself really isn’t too bad to be honest. It doesn’t have the same level of energy or aggression as earlier Metallica songs, but it proves that the band can combine some aggression with some melody to come out with a nicely balanced song. This is considered to be the song that really launched Metallica into the public eye, as if the rest of The Black Album wouldn’t do that anyway, but it’s easy to understand why. The song has a nice blend of heavy guitar riffs, a fast solo, and extremely catchy vocal melodies and hooks. As I said in my review for One, criticizing the band for releasing that video just doesn’t make any sense to me. However, for this video I suppose I could understand criticizing the band
for releasing this video just because the song is a lot more commercial and the video isn’t quite as dark and disturbing as the music video for One. Nevertheless, I don’t criticize Metallica for this music video as I still think they didn’t follow the trend of the late eighties and early nineties stream of music videos, they did something different and they pulled it off pretty nicely.

The Video – The video for Enter Sandman continues in the same trend that they introduced with One where it shifts between the band performing the song and then the story to go with it. In fact now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure all of Metallica’s videos follow this pattern despite possibly a few exceptions. The whole video is shot in a very flashing effect, particularly when the band is playing. Basically this means that one shot won’t be shown for an extremely long period of time. I think that some people will like this effect while others may be a bit annoyed by it. I’m personally not a huge fan of it, but at the same time it doesn’t completely ruin the video for me. The flashing effect does give the video a bit of an eerie feel and a feeling of unconsciousness. Although not quite as creative as One in terms of lyrical content and video execution, the filming of this video isn’t too bad to be honest. The boy in this video has various nightmares of falling of
a high building, drowning, a truck chasing him, etc. Metallica does another good job of matching the dark lyrics of the song with a dark themed video. The coordination of the music and the video is also pretty good in my opinion, particularly in the part where the boy dreams he’s being chased by the truck and the truck destroys his bed, the music fits perfectly in that spot. The video isn’t quite as emotionally power or dark as One, but it definitely fits the song and it has quite a few cool parts to it in my opinion, a good follow up music video in my opinion.

Rating: 7