Apparently February, by virtue of random selection, in metal month. As with last week's focus on Megadeth, I've had a strong love-hate relationship with Metallica for most of my life. I was just getting into them around the time of their blockbuster self-titled album (a.k.a. the "Black Album"), but was listening to the earlier albums, mostly Master of Puppets. So when I finally got a taste of stuff like "Enter Sandman", it sounded just a bit disingenuous, trading aggression (musically and lyrically) for slicker production and a wider audience. Obvious my opinions didn't give the band any regrets about getting more commercial, as the album became and remains their bestselling album, as well as one of the bestselling albums of all time, a Dark Side of the Moon for the 1990's.
Any hope that Metallica would revert back to their old sound was shattered after the five year hiatus (in recording, NOT touring), with the release of Load. It was clear that fame and the 1990's in general had softened the band's sound and image considerably. For some reason, the band seems to like to "justify" the insanely long periods of time between albums by maxing out the running time of a single CD, as if to demonstrate that they actually were quite busy recording between albums. However, this usually just results in listeners never actually making it to the end of the album out of sheer fatigue. If you have Reload in your iTunes (or other comparable program) library, I bet you have more spins on "Fuel" than "Fixxxer".
I get ahead of myself, however. Since Metallica was unable to invent a disc that could hold more than 80 minutes of music, and unwilling to release a double album or do "twin albums" (think Use Your Illusion) they ended up releasing their seventh album just a year after the sixth, with the lightly-twinned title Reload. Not surprisingly it sounds a lot like Load, and if you played a random track from one or the other I probably wouldn't be able to confidently tell you which album it belongs on. However, as my two least favorite Metallica albums, I've rarely given either very close listens. Neither album is the work of a band hungry for success; they are the product of super-rich guys who decided to stop giving a crap about what people thought of them. Lars went going bald, James went going redneck, Kirk put on makeup, and Jason, well visibility was never his strong suit. The iconic covers of their 1980's albums were replaced with the kind of abstractions you see on the walls of the offices of corporate America.
So what can I say about Reload? It's a comfortable album, by Metallica standards. Even a past-paced number like the opener, "Fuel", doesn't particularly sizzle like a "Hit the Lights" or "Blackened". The band was very much under the spell of their producer, Bob Rock, notorious for pumping them full of questionable recording approaches. Guitar solos, which were the main attraction of early Metallica, are present but largely subjugated to the vocals. To help improve their image as a "mature" band in the eyes of the critics, guests like Marianne Faithfull ("The Memory Remains") and a hurdy-gurdy ("Low Man's Lyric") helped to distance the band from their speed-metal roots. The "metal" in the band's name, in spite of some "chunky" sections on the album, was beginning to feel more like aluminium than steel. Aside from some of the non-album stuff that followed Reload, this is about as lightweight as the band would get. While none of the stuff here is anything a regular rock band would be ashamed to record and release, it all feels very disingenuous for a band that perfected the art of metal and developed its fanbase of millions by 1986.
Thankfully the trajectory would change, brought on by a massive and very publicly displayed mid-life crisis in the band's history. Metallica would go on to fire Kirk Hammett and hire a steel drummer to back up Lars Ulrich for the next album, St. Anger. Of course I am joking, but I need to save my dissertation on St. Anger for the day that album turns up as the Random Selection of the Week.
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