Metallica - Reload
Metallica
Reload
Release Date: November 18th, 1997
Label: Elektra
Review by Jared Stossel
The early 1990s were excellent for Metallica. They had seen tremendous success with The Black Album, catapulting them to new heights far beyond any of their predecessors in the heavy metal scene. The mid-to-late 1990s were a bit of a different story. Shortly after the release of Reload, the second of a technical double album released at the tail end of 1997, Metallica would come close to imploding. You can actually hear it in their songs as they get deeper into this time period, veering further and further away from the elements that had made them the biggest metal band in the world. They would eventually (and thankfully) get back to this point less than a decade later, but not without some growing pains. The plan after The Black Album was to team up with producer Bob Rock once more and release a full-on double album, giving diehard fans nearly thirty songs. Thinking on it, they decided to take a step back and not bombard listeners all at once, allowing the songs to be digested over a period of time.
A little over a year after the release of Load, Metallica released the back half of that theoretical double-LP, Reload. While a few songs would indeed stand out – and still live beautifully within the band’s setlist to this day – a good deal of Reload feels like a band that’s lost and trying to find themselves again. It’s similar to Load in numerous ways – the artwork again a photograph from avant-garde artist Andres Serrano, who mixed bovine blood with his own urine to concoct the impressionist creation that adorns the front cover. This is a period of Metallica that finds them leaning into the eccentric, experimenting with other styles (sometimes, to great success!), almost searching for a way to shed themselves completely of their thrash metal roots, despite the fact that that’s what made them so memorable in the first place.
Reload starts incredibly strong with “Fuel” – ironically, this might be my favorite Metallica track of all time (and it sings when performed on their San Francisco Symphony-backed S&M record). The lyrics are simplistic enough, vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield roaring into the microphone about the thrill of car racing (“One hundred plus through black and white/ War horse, warhead / Fuck ‘em man, white knuckle tight”), with the four-piece running on all cylinders. It’s followed by “The Memory Remains”, providing fans with a chorus that was completely symbolic of where they were at that time: wrestling with fame, trying to remember who they were, yet still forging ahead (“Fortune, fame / Mirror vain / Gone insane / But the memory remains”). A cameo from Marianne Faithfull comes in the bridge, approaching a baritone range as she sings nothing but “da da da da”. This one moment provides one of the best moments in Metallica shows today; whenever the song approaches Faithfull’s line, it’s never delivered quietly, instead being brought to life by a chorus of a hundred thousand heavy metal fans. It’s near impossible to put into words the feeling I get when I experience it in person.
Yet despite these two outstanding moments, the rest of Reload comes off as a method of experimentation, a band at the top of their game afraid to embrace who they are. “Devil’s Dance” tries to embody the attitude of The Black Album’s “Sad But True”, but it feels like something is missing. The band further tries to follow up Black Album with “The Unforgiven II”. It’s composed nicely enough, but it feels like an unnecessary sequel to what was a great standalone track in the first place. “Better Than You” and “Slither” veer into hard rock territory, while “Carpe Diem Baby” and “Bad Seed” feel almost like a stylistic rehashing of ideas seen earlier in the album.
Ballad territory is reached on “Where The Wild Things Are”, a seven-minute entry that takes its name from the Maurice Sendak children’s book; again, that oomph that was once heard on “The Unforgiven”, “Fade To Black” or “One” is absent. For a brief moment, we are reminded of the hard-hitting Metallica we’ve come to know and love on “Prince Charming”. The tempo is brought back up, the guitar work is memorable, and the band proves that they still know how to craft a catchy chorus. “Prince Charming” is immediately followed by the quiet “Low Man’s Lyric”, Hetfield singing in the lower register over a clean guitar riff accompanied by a hurdy-gurdy and violin. “Attitude” brings things right back up to speed, the rhythmic aspects from bassist Jason Newsted and drummer Lars Ulrich playing well with Kirk Hammett’s playing and Hetfield’s vocal delivery.
Reload closes with “Fixxer”, venturing away from the Blues-esque stylings that closed out their predecessor. The song is eight minutes long and feels like it could have been honed down a bit more, cruising until it ends rather abruptly. At that moment, Metallica ended its era of experimentation. The next few years would find the band torn apart at the seams, examining, reimagining, and purging their psyches of resentment, long-held inner demons, and the fear of burning out. The trials of the biggest band in the world were well underway, and all of it would come to a head with anger. In a weird way, Reload is the calm before the storm.
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