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Metallica - 'Load' 2 stars

Sheesh.

Here Metallica finally takes a real turn in their sound. Any of their fast paced, real thrash moments were gone, as well as the angst. Instead, we have much slower paced, hard rock songs mixed with a radio friendly sound that made this one of the most controversial bands to exist. The sound produced by the above segments created a terrible and overall boring sound. The solo's were also just slow blues, which Hammett really isn't very good at, because blues usually evokes emotion, which Hammett also doesn't do, just feels like he is just hitting any note in the scales and is satisfied with himself.

This album just dragged on and on. While this didn't have horrific intentions, I'll give it two stars at most. If you think this is the worst you are in for a real treat. This started the end of Metallica.

"Load" is the 6th full-length studio album by US heavy metal act Metallica. The album was released in June 1996 by Vertigo Records. Five years had gone by since the release of the band´s multi million selling album "Metallica (1991)" and the fans expectations were very high at this point. Metallica again chose Bob Rock to produce the album (never change a winning formula). 27 songs were written during the sessions and the band had initially planned to make a double CD release but they opted to release the songs they had finished recording as a single CD release as they had been offered to play on the Lollapalooza tour in the summer of 1996 and wanted a new album out before that. The 13 remaining songs that didn´t make it unto "Load" were released on the next studio album "Reload (1997)".

The music on "Load" is completely stripped anything that points toward Metallica´s thrash metal past. While those elements were already very sparse on "Metallica", at least they were there. The music on "Load" is more hard rock/ heavy rock blues based in style than ever before and while I´d still call the music metal, there´s generally a softer and more mainstream approach to songwriting on the album. There are a few harder edged riffs here and there that fully qualify as metal though. The album was the longest Metallica album up until then with it´s 78:59 minutes long playing time distributed over 14 tracks. That´s at least a couple of tracks too long if you ask me.

The sound production is professional but lacks the metallic power of the predecessor.

"Load" is just like it´s sister album "Reload" a pretty unremarkable and medicore affair. The album seriously lacks highlights/ standout tracks, the production lacks edge and the music lacks attitude. Compared to the "Black Album", "Load" is quite the disappointment but it´s still a somewhat consistent and decent affair deserving a 2.5 - 3 star rating.

The end

I like when a band takes different direction to explore some other types and genres of music. Not now, of course, because it has to be made with elegance and quality. The situation here is totally different. Metallica takes the commercial development and it looks like they will never get back. The genre in Load is absolutely different - mixture between country, blues and alternative music combined in mediocre way. No sign of thrash!!! The worst in Load is the length of the album - it's too long and because of that some more dull, boring and shapeless. At that moment of their career, they've lost the sense of making heavier music. But there is other aspect in here. They partially kept their sense of making ballads. These ballads save the album. Namely these ballads are the only good songs here, with Mama Said being the best one. The other songs deserving attention are: Until It Sleeps, The House Jack Built and Bleeding Me. Because of them - 1,75 stars!

Well, I wasn't fan of them at the end so, don't expect a better rate.

Yeah, I'm not fan of them, but I do appreciate their capability of making impressive thrash metal during the 80's. Now, when you take the complex arrangements away, what you have left is just an average hard rock band, but for me it's too evident the limitation of their creativity during the middle 90's.

Hetfield vocals fits better with the more limited music, but his voice is plain and the lyrics are really childish, and metal is way more than that. Hammett, Ulrich and Newsted are average musicians at best and only the riffing guitars of Hetfield stand tall in this album, but don't save this lame production.

Not a single song made it. This is maybe their worst album. If you like the 80's Metallica, maybe you won't like this particular album. Now, if you like 90's Metallica, this album can be for you. But is, certainly, not for me. 1 star, this album is really poor.

Let's get something clear right away: my relative dislike of this and Reload is not for the stereotypical reasons. I can easily forgive the band members for getting their hair cut; if anything, it would be sad if a bunch of guys in their mid-30's didn't finally get rid of their long hair. I can forgive the band's switch in style to something resembling a weird cross between metal, classic rock and early 90's grunge; I'll admit that the genericism irritates me a bit, but it's not a death knell if the melodies and riffs are good. I can forgive James for hamming up and overemoting in almost every song on here; it's something I got used to eventually. I can even forgive Kirk for losing almost all invention and individuality in his soloing style; this and the next album show a ridiculous obsession with his wah-wah pedal, and the rest of the time he apes every stereotypical "rock star" cliche, but even that isn't crippling (and besides, it still comes in the context of good interplay, though much less spectacular than in the past).

But what I cannot and will not forgive is the FILLER. Between this and Reload, I'd say that there is an awesome 45-minute album buried within, and a rock solid 60-minute could be made as well. But there is over two-and-a-half hours of material between these two monsters, and far more of it falls into the "mediocre or worse" bin than not. Just think about it, though; these may be single-CD releases, but 15 years earlier they would have each been double LP's (and heck, you could have fit 5 early Beach Boys albums into the running time of these two CD's). Hey, do you think it's just a coincidence that, between the late 60's and the start of the CD age, 95% of all albums fell into the range of 35 to 45 minutes? There's a reason for that, people; it's hard enough to come up with sufficient quality material to fill that time range, and coming up with more was reserved for instances where, justifiably or not, the artist thought they could make a major artistic statement with a double album. Heck, even Metallica themselves basically stuck in that time range on their first three albums; it was only on ...Justice and TBA where the band had started to have (moderately) significant problems with excess. What the band was exactly thinking in releasing 4 LP's-worth of material in a two-year stretch (the kind of thing reserved in the old days for The Clash in '79-'80 or Frank Zappa in any given six-month period), especially when they had five years of rust built up, is something I'm rather blurry on.

Of the fourteen tracks on here, I'd say half are solid keepers. "Ain't My Bitch" is a worthy successor to the rockers on Metallica, with solid intensity and satisfyingly thick guitar sounds to support a decent vocal melody. "2x4" has a neat slightly discordant set of main riffs that make for a decent moderately bluesy rocker, and rounding out what would be side one of four is the mega-hit "Until it Sleeps," which happens to also be my favorite of the album by a good margin. Yes, the melody is slightly reminiscient of "Nothing Else Matters", but the song would be great if for no other reason than that its main feature is heavy surf guitar, and the fact that it has a lot of tension and a good deal of creepiness only helps things. "King Nothing" may be overlong (it's essentially a three- minute pop song stretched into 5:30), but it's got a winner of a bassline, and the "where's your crown King Nothing" parts are as hooky as a college student scheduled for an 8 am lecture, so it can stick around. The big hit "Hero of the Day" is a little dippy, but it's a pleasant enough heavy happy pop diversion, so I don't skip it. "Mama Said" is a fine downbeat acoustic anthem full of tasty steel guitar bits (I can see why metalheads would absolutely despise it), and the closing "The Outlaw Torn" manages to justify its length (nearly ten minutes) with a great feeling of desperation, not to mention the eerily nice quiet guitar bits that pop up in the middle that contribute to the tension of the slow, rumbling riffage that makes up the rest.

So that's seven tracks, and largely thanks to the length of the last one, it's about forty minutes of good material. And guess what, the rest absolutely sucks. Well, ok, I need to issue a caveat there; there aren't many individual moments that jump out that make me go "wow, this is terrible." No, my dislike of the rest is more of a gradual, nagging sense of boredom, a feeling that something interesting should have happened by now but hadn't. The only truly embarrassing moment is that part in "The House That Jack Built" which features the ugliest case of somebody trying to sing along with a guitar solo that I've ever heard, but there aren't any great moments in the song to counter that, and the rest of the songs are in one ear and out the other. The only song that really has potential to my ears is the bluesy rocker "Ronnie," but it doesn't move much beyond a decent riff.

In the end, Load, as a whole, isn't terrible, but its good moments are balanced almost 1-to-1 by mind-numbing boredom. I really get the feeling that the band hoped with a lot of these tracks that just doing things in a different style was enough to make the album interesting, and that they'd be able to get away with any criticisms with the counter of "you just need to let go of the past" or something like that. But man, I may like a lot of classic rock, but that doesn't mean I need to like Grand Funk Railroad, and I may like a lot of prog, but that doesn't mean I need to like Kansas. The weaker songs may be passable as background music, but I don't think that's what the band would have wanted said when they were making these songs.

Different is not a bad thing!

However, this album is.

Despite what I used to think in my younger days, different is not bad. A band changing its sound is not automatically bad, and experimenting is good. Sadly, "selling out" has nothing to do with why this album is bad. The music takes all the responsibility for that.

As crazy as it sounds I actually like this album a little better than the Black Album. While this album is generic, it is at least a bit faster paced and just more upbeat overall. The hour long ballad of a snore fest that was the Black Album has been replaced with a more hard rock, bluesy sounding album. Actually, that sounds very appealing to me. I would love that! The problem is, this album is overall, boring.

Ronnie, for example, is a pretty sweet sounding song. However, I can barely make it to the end as it just feels so dull by then, (jeez how many times have I written that now).

Wasting my Hate I really like. Cool sounding, decent amount of heavy rockness, really awesome feel. Not to long.

This is counterbalanced by "Mama Said". This is just an insult to the fans. I guess unless you happen to like country as well...

King Nothing may be the best song on the album.

I will not continue on, because most of the songs fall into the same category: Kind of cool, got some nice feel/moments but overall boring. I actually like this better than the Black Album, its groovy, as in it actually has some groove to it, some feel, (unlike the Black Album). It is just flat out generic and dull though. I wish we could do half star ratings...

Two and a half stars!

My experience with Load was a surprisingly pleasant one! Of course there is no comparison to even the weakest Thrash Metal-era albums but by the time I got this album, around 2001, I had already lost any preconceived notions of hearing anything other than a straightforward Hard Rock album.

A funny fact about my relation to this album is that I associate it with the game Unreal Tournament, which I purchased only a few weeks after Load. I remember vividly how I often played the two side-by-side, with Unreal Tournament's music turned off, and a lot of that nostalgic charm has indeed rub itself off on Load.

It might be unexpected that I happen to enjoy this release more than the Black Album but my explanation to this phenomenon is pretty simple. The Black Album was a market scam that fooled the fans into believing that Metallica was still a Thrash Metal band with singles like Enter Sandman, The Unforgiven, Nothing Else Matters and Wherever I May Roam. Once the fans got the actual albums they felt cheated after hearing that the rest of material there was mainly Heavy Metal. Load never gave the fans any other notion than that it was going to be a Hard Rock album with a slight country vibe added to it by James' vocal approach. This can be easily observed from singles like Until It Sleeps, Ain't My Bitch, Hero Of The Day, Mama Said and King Nothing.

Besides, Heavy Metal style of the Black Album did resemble Thrash Metal and made me hope that Metallica would give us at least one song in style of their past glory. Hard Rock is far from anything that Metallica had done to this point, which is why I didn't even hope for anything outside that basic formula.

In conclusion, this album is not as bad as most Metallica fans make it seem! Of course that isn't really saying much considering that the material here doesn't come near anything from Metallica's classic era. Still, I personally enjoy this one more than the Black Album since the band is truer to their new sound and make it sound more convincing. I guess you'll just have to find out for yourself whether you like it or not, just make sure to lock up your prejudge in a safe vault first!

**** star songs: Ain't My Bitch (5:04) 2 X 4 (5:28) The House Jack Built (6:39) Until It Sleeps (4:30) King Nothing (5:27) Hero Of The Day (4:22) Bleeding Me (8:18) Mama Said (5:19) Thorn Within (5:51)

*** star songs: Cure (4:54) Poor Twisted Me (4:00) Wasting My Hate (3:57) Ronnie (5:17) The Outlaw Torn (9:49)

Who kidnapped my Metallica?

This album is actually better in my opinion than the previous, but it is also not anywhere near being their best, but I can still enjoy this album and I have say this is the best 90's album from Metallica. While a lot of the songs do not have that destinctive Metallica feel I think this album gets unfairly bashed just because it is such a departure from what they had been previously been putting out.

I find the songs as a whole to be more memorable than those on The Boring Black Album, even if they are not all that consistent. i really enjoy The Outlaw Torn, and King Nothing is another one that I am pretty found of too. 2x4 is another one that I enjoy, as is Cure which are both very nice little hard rock songs.

The rest however are a bit too out there (from this bands stand point) to be very enjoyable. Bleeding Me takes to long to get going and is forgettable. Ronnie is a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd frontman Ronnie Van Zant, who died in a plane crash in 1977. The only problem with this song is that it has that country rock sound, which i like being an Alabamian, who loves to drive around downtorn Birmingham with a Skynyrd song coming out my speakers. The problem with this song is it is a very bad sounding country rock song. This band is very fond of Lynyrd Skynyrd, but this song is just not good at all. The other songs are just okay songs that do not affect my in any way .

I also have to say that is the absolute worst album cover to any Metallica release ever. Blood and semen. Haha. Load. They should have spent more time on the songs than trying to come up with a stupid cover and title that was a very horrible attempt at humor.

A underrated album (barely underrated) but underrated nonetheless.