METALLICA — ReLoad (review)

METALLICA — ReLoad album cover Album · 1997 · Heavy Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Pekka
Metallica certainly wasn't scared of the thrashing that Load got from a big portion of their fans but stayed their course and released the rest of the sessions a year later as ReLoad. The sound was the same, the hair was the same, so the reception was the same if not worse still.

But ReLoad contains a lot of great material. The speeding opener Fuel is still a concert classic and on the same level is the sludgy pair of The Memory Remains and Devil's Dance. Both would be bettered still on the S&M live album, but sadly The Unforgiven II is a song they've never really touched live. Not quite on par with its predecessor, but a great country-tinged ballad nevertheless. James has great depth in his voice. Where the Wild Things Are and Low Man's Lyric are a couple of underrated masterpieces and very unusual material for Metallica, the former with its ethereal feel and marching rhythms and the latter with its violin and hurdy gurdy flavored balladness. The latter also features one of my favourite lines of lyric ever heard on a Metallica album: "I lie straight to the mirror, that I've broken to match my face". Fixxer is a great closing piece very much like the Outlaw Torn from the previous album.

But ReLoad also features many of the all time worst Metallica pieces. I will never ever understand on what grounds Better Than You won a Grammy except that it was a new Metallica track and when Metallica released new material they automatically got a Grammy for it. Attitude and Prince Charming are two other meaningless rocking-for-rocking's-sake pieces best left on the studio floor. But as they later said in an interview, every single Metallica song written since the beginning of their career had been released on a studio album and they weren't going to leave anything out this time either, no matter if all the songs weren't their best ever. Bad Seed brings things down as well with its lazy grooving, but it's not quite as passable as the three mentioned. Slither and Carpe Diem Baby are completely erased from the books of rock history, but they are very very solid pieces of work both somewhere in between the highs and lows of the album.

If you've seen or heard Metallica live in the recent years you might have noticed that some of the band members really drag the band down in the faster thrashier pieces by their sheer lack of ability and tightness, but with this kind of mid-tempo material everyone is at their best. Lars' drumming really fits the material well and Kirk delivers some very tasteful soli. James is vocally at his finest and Jason's sound is a pleasure to listen to.

Metallica stuck to their guns with this one and the results are varied. Some excellent underrated material and some genuine stinkers. Definitely one of their least good albums but still, yes, good as a whole.
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