Quarantine has left us all with a lot of downtime, and like many, I’m looking for something comforting in music, something familiar. Like most times when I’m feeling down and lost, I look to the music of my youth for something to hold onto. Not that much of the music I liked in my teens is objectively Good: Led Zeppelin IV may be their crowning achievement, but it wasn’t until they stopped ripping off old blues musicians and embraced knotty, math rock levels of composition with
Presence did the band finally start to sound like more than the sum of their parts.
The same goes for Metallica: While The Big Three (Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and ...And Justice for All) are the Metallica of my youth, they’re essentially three attempts at the same formula, right down to the track listing and style of each song. All three have The Fast Opening Song, followed by the Title Track, then a comparatively slower ballad, an instrumental, and a final thrash track. 80s Metallica was predictable in the best way, since metalheads are a fickle bunch and can only handle a small variety of the same heavy metal.
While 1991’s The Black Album (or Metallica, if you prefer to be a pedantic asshole about it) may have seemed like a sea change at the time, it was still Metallica, albeit in slightly different ratios. Their songs always had mid-tempo sections, even if they were bookended with tremolo-picked thrash riffs. The self-titled album just took out the really fast parts, used 1 or 2 riffs per song instead of a dozen, and dropped their tendency to slightly alter the riffs each time it was repeated. The songs were still long, but plodded through extra choruses instead of adding an acoustic interlude. At the time I was still enamored with Fast Metallica, and the Black Album seemed like a concession to the mainstream. Teenagers are, and remain, idiots.
So just imagine my reaction when a new Metallica album was announced in 1996, during my freshman year of high school. The cover was covered in blood, reminding me more of Cannibal Corpse covers than the iconic art of Metallica. Load was a funny title, but the cover had blood! Their logo was changed a little, but hey they’d had it since before I was born, time to switch it up a little.
The PR surge leading up to the release was unavoidable, what with their short hair, edgy Anton Corbijn photos, nipple piercings, and tattoos. The Black Album was austere, severe, and five years later they put an actual cumshot on the cover. In hindsight it does seem odd that they felt the need to have this Very Nineties Grunge look when past Metallica songs had covered such lighthearted fare as state executions, giant monsters, nuclear annihilation, and infanticide. They didn’t even use the most controversial Andres Serrano piece!
The funniest of my Load memories is Alice in Chains’ bassist Mike Inez writing "Friends Don't Let Friends Get Friends Haircuts...” on his instrument in reaction to seeing Metallica in the front row of their Unplugged show, taped just a few months before Load was released. Don’t worry, Alice in Chains will come up later. For now… patience.
In retrospect, the “failure” (if you can call a multi-platinum album a failure) of Load comes down more to marketing than music. Myself and the rest of the young, white, socially inept males that made up most of Metallica’s fanbase really weren’t ready for a change in the Helvetica typeset liner notes, let alone anything that sounded much different from the albums they’d been releasing the preceding 13 years.
I bought Load at Media Play, a relic of the 90s which, even at the time, seemed like a losing proposition. Hitting play on my Discman back then, 14 year old me was not enamored with this New Metallica. The thing is, for all the glamor shots and music videos suffused with the typical mid-90s MTV aesthetic, the music doesn’t stray far from the regular Metallica formula. The biggest difference being, to my now mature and understanding ears, is that they started to write Songs instead of linking riffs together until they resembled a song. The band Converge call this “Part-y songs”, referring to their early days of joining unrelated riffs together like train cars until it seemed like a song. Mastodon also did this in their early days, describing it as “dumping riffs on the floor and sifting through them until a song emerged”. Both bands are still around, and their longevity has as much to do with their eventual embrace of traditional verse/chorus song forms as the relative quality of their output.
Alice in Chains may have perfected the typical Grunge Band vibe, but even their heaviest tracks started out as songs you can play on an acoustic guitar. Not only did Metallica start to follow this songwriting path with Load, they were even known to cover “Them Bones” live, one of my favorite Alice in Chains songs. For all of Layne Staley’s self-lacerating lyrics, “Them Bones” is structured like a typical blues song, despite the riff being in ⅞. Building a song from the ground up so that it can stand on its own without any ornamentation is the deceptively difficult part of songwriting, which Metallica took in some pretty good directions, but not without some bum parts.
So what does Load sound like? Mostly the boogie end of Black Sabbath, bluesy 70s Southern Rock, with a dollop of grunge angst slathered over the whole mess. And it is a mess, don’t think I’m lavishing praise on some unappreciated classic. Metallica are incapable of playing with the kind of behind-the-beat swing that makes swamp rock work, so tracks like “Poor Twisted Me” come across like a weak parody instead of a tribute.
The album, like most popular music in the mid-90s, stretched the limitations of CD capacity—The album’s shrink wrap even came with a sticker boasting of its 78:59 runtime! The following years ReLoad ran a brief 76 minutes, with fewer memorable tracks and with the general feeling that they should have been relegated to B-side status. Few of the songs on either album needed to break the 3 minute mark, though the shortest by far is just a hair under 4 minutes, and most hover around 5 to 6 minutes.
Starting out your first album in 5 years with 5 minutes of generic riffage called “Ain’t My Bitch” wasn’t a good call, let’s get that out there. Especially for a band that boasted of not bending to the same chauvinistic “oh baby baby” lyrics of hair metal, it seemed completely out of character. It’s lyrically puerile, but even worse was the first of many uses of structuring the song with a false ending before playing the opening riff again. Besides stretching the song out, nothing is gained from this, it’s just filling up more 1s and 0s on the CD. “2x4” fares slightly better, with a pentatonic riff straight out of the Tony Iommi playbook, but again with some pretty dumb lyrics.
However, the next four tracks are the most consistent 20 minutes the band would ever create, oddly enough by foregrounding some of the most despairing lyrics James Hetfield has ever written. He’s never been known as a really positive guy, with his well-documented childhood riddled with tragedy, but on this record he managed to use some sort of alchemy to turn his pain into something approaching the sublime. Either it was producer Bob Rock’s search for perfection, or his own search for an outlet for his pain, but Hetfield’s lyrics were never better than on Load, and sadly they never got any better in the records that came after.
“The House Jack Built”, an unflinching look at alcohol addiction (which Hetfield would go to rehab for twice in the next 20 years), uses the metaphor of the body as a decaying house. Lyrical quality in metal is a pretty low bar to pass, but lines like “Is that the moon or just a light that lights this dead-end street?” elevate it above the era’s kings of self-loathing, while introducing the concept of a forgiving light that Hetfield would return to later.
“Until it Sleeps” was the lead single, and its video (directed by the ubiquitous Samuel Bayer) is a hellscape based on Hieronymus Bosch paintings (which aren’t quite as spooky when rendered as giant Muppets). The video is full of out-of-focus shots, grotesque extras, and those flashes from starting a film camera with the aperture open; basically every 90s cliche crammed together. It’s a shame that now the video looks hilariously dated, since the song is a journey through Hetfield’s early experiences with his mother’s death and the impact it had on his life, including his inability to form lasting relationships. It’s one of the most un-Metallica sounding songs on the album, and an odd choice to re-introduce the band to the world, but maybe the best way to learn to swim is to jump into the deep end first. Metallica were never this tuneful, using fairly standard alternative rock dynamics to deliver lyrics of such self-hatred that it puts many of the misery purveyors of the time to shame.
While eagle-eyed fans may have noticed the album contains a sequel to the Black Album’s “The Unforgiven”, they may have gotten just as much a sense of deja vu from “King Nothing”, a bald-faced rewrite of “Enter Sandman”, right down to the way the pre-chorus modulates up one step. That’s not a knock on it; many bands have based entire careers on writing the same song over and over again, and “Enter Sandman” is as good a song as any to self-plagiarize. “King Nothing” would have been an obvious choice for a lead single, and probably would have changed the entire way the album was received, but this is a band that loves shooting itself in the foot: witness the dry, brittle production of ...And Justice for All that came before, or the tin can drum sound and weak songwriting of St Anger that came after.
The next track, “Hero of the Day”, is not just the best song Metallica has ever written, but one of the best rock songs of the 90s. It may start off with a folky sounding clean guitar riff, but it builds as the song goes on, until busting out the double bass pedals and palm-muted riffs the band used to deploy in every song. It’s mostly in a major key, a big departure for a band that used to use the flat fifth tritone in nearly every song, creating havoc for lead guitarist Kirk Hammett when he tried to figure out how to solo over it.
It’s probably the quarantine’s pressure on my brittle psyche, but a line like “The window burns to light the way back home/A light that warms, no matter where they've gone” hits me in the gut. Using light as a metaphor for hope is some English 101 shit, but it’s explored in ways that elevate it way above their metal peers, with lines like “still the window burns” and “keepers of the flame” illustrating the idea of persevering through even the toughest circumstances.
With current world events pressing down on everyone, and no end in sight, the line “Now, deservingly, this easy chair/But the rocking stopped by wheels of despair” came outta nowhere and floored me. “Wheels of despair” sounds like it could have been on Joy Division’s Closer (indeed, late-period track “Ceremony” did include the line “Notice whom for wheels are turning”), and in 1996 there was little precedent for a mainstream metal band to have genuinely good lyrics that weren’t either a rewrite of a classic book or that read like a paragraph in a philosophy textbook.
The back half of Load is mostly generic rock that trades the front half’s surprisingly eloquent lyrics for boneheaded declarations and even more boneheaded riffs. The album comes back into focus with the closer “The Outlaw Torn”, a rare song on the album that benefits from it’s nearly ten-minute runtime. The original version was even longer, but a section at the end was cut to fit it on a single CD; the full version appears on the “Memory Remains” single the following year. Personally, “Cure” and “Wasting My Hate” could have been cut with no drop in quality for the album, but Metallica does what Metallica wants, even to their own detriment.
The midtempo, bass-heavy groove of “The Outlaw Torn” gives the song a ton of space, something Metallica were never known for. Prior to the album’s release, Kirk Hammett mentioned Godflesh as an influence on Load, and indeed cover artist Andres Serrano also did covers and a music video for the UK based metal band. While “The Outlaw Torn” doesn’t come anywhere near the grinding, torture slab bass of G.C. Green, it does act as a great framework for the guitars to circle around. The songwriting shows the band was, at times, capable of listening to what each other was playing, complementing each other instead of pounding away at the same riff. The song ebbs and flows over the extended run time, but never feels like it’s running in place, which is about as organic as you’re gonna get from a band that usually arranges songs with mathematical precision. It’s heavy, it’s quiet, it even allows for a little bit of a jam session near the end.
Lyrically it also makes the best use of space, with a few choice phrases describing a feeling of longing and despair, while remaining vague enough for the listener to fill in the blanks. Part of me wonders if the quality of this last track was lost on the listeners who gave up 40 minutes into the album, but it’s worth the effort to track down. The song also serves as another curveball for Metallica fans accustomed to the predictable tracklist of previous albums: every album since 1986’s Master of Puppets has concluded with a really fast thrashy track, like a little treat for the old school listeners. Ending with a sprawling, slow, heavy epic is a bit more in keeping with the usual flow of albums in general, and served as yet another sign the Metallica of tight jeans and white sneakers was left in the past.
