BrooMetallicA: Crafting the perfect Load/Reload album
An era of excess that could have been paired down to make something with more impact.
I previously promised a review of “Hamilton” on Disney+ for the next edition of the newsletter. After sitting on it for a bit, I decided that I was not able to write anything that hasn’t already been said about it in both the positive and critical aspects of the show. To sum it all up, Hamilton is great and worth your time. You’ll laugh, you’ll be moved to tears and you might just learn something, too!
Now let’s move on to something completely different.
In an earlier newsletter post, I had stated how my favorite band on the face of the earth is Metallica. Sometimes that is met with acclaim and other times not so much. Metallica’s music is the gateway drug for me into pretty much everything heavy that I listen to now.
There’s a raw power to their music, especially the earlier albums, that few bands can replicate. They invented a genre in thrash metal with 1983’s Kill ‘Em All and with each subsequent release (Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, …And Justice for All, Metallica) they stepped forward as songwriters and musicians to push their brand forward.
After touring on the Justice album for a few years, it was clear that this was a band that was burned out by playing long, complicated songs. Their next album, the self-titled “Black Album”, saw them strip things down with songs that were a bit more radio-friendly, but still as heavy and loud as anything they have ever put out, for the most part. By the time 1991 rolled around, Metallica was the biggest band in the world and they toured on that record for almost four years. Before this, they had never gone more than three years between releases and certainly did not tour as extensively as they did on the cycle for their fifth album.
They had reached the pinnacle of their careers and were a band with nothing left to achieve or prove to anyone. With this status as an artist comes the ability to do whatever you want and to experiment, which is what the next 13 or so years of their career can be best described as.
Metallica entered the studio in 1995 with around 30 songs to play with, which was much larger than the batches of music they typically would come into the recording process with. This was the birth of the Load and Reload era of the band, which also saw them abandon their thrash metal roots in favor of grungier, blues, and hard rock-type songs. They also *gasp* cut their hair and there certainly was a vibe of pretentiousness to this new look of theirs. These were no longer the hungry and angry kids who defined American metal music through the 1980s into the early 1990s.
Originally intended as a double album, Metallica eventually would decide to release the 27 songs that they had decided to move forward with as two separate albums with Load coming out in 1996 and Reload just a year later in 1997. Members of the band would state that this had to due with not wanting to spend a huge chunk of time in the studio, so they gave themselves a bit of a break.
Something that has been a bit of a staple for this band in the post-Black Album era is an inability at times to self-edit and overindulgence with new material. Again, when you achieved what this band was able to, you kind of earn the right to do so. The Load/Reload era is the perfect summation of this, as both albums overstay their welcome with filler tracks. There’s still plenty of good material here, but some of the songs are repetitive and played at similar tempos.
Is this my favorite era of the band? No way, especially when you read the, uh, backstory behind the cover art for both of these albums. It’s fucking disgusting and so ridiculously offputting. However, if this album was paired down to a single 12-track experience, I think that Metallica could have put out something with a little more punch while still achieving their goals of pushing their sound forward into new and interesting directions.
Below are the Load and Reload tracks that I would put onto a single album or playlist. All of these songs have grown on me more as I’ve gotten older and I will go track-by-track to explain why they were picked. There’s also a Spotify playlist at the end of the list so that you can enjoy it alongside me.
1. Fuel (ReLoad, 1997)
A Metallica album should punch you in the face right from the start, so we are just going to go ahead and jump right into it here. James Hetfield’s lyrics started to take a more personal turn during this era of the band and while this is not the best example of well-crafted and emotional songwriting, it still gets you going right off the bat.
It’s a song about driving fast cars, people.
2. Ain’t My Bitch (Load, 1996)
Here, we keep the grooving going with the opener off of Load. The titular bitch in the title is not a lady, but about a problem. Ain’t My Bitch is probably a cooler title than “Ain’t My Problem” for a hard rock/metal band, plus it is admittedly fun to growl like Hetfield does here.
3. The Memory Remains (ReLoad, 1997)
This song is so cool and is an incredible live moment when Metallica decide to play it, as the fans sing the part that Marianne Faithful does in the studio version of the song. This is the first song here that is an example of the band moving away from political and war-centric lyrics to something a little more personal and darker. This one is about a celebrity who’s status has faded away from their best years as they fall out of touch with the real world. The subject of fame and isolation would be a topic that would be revisited a few times in the years that followed.
4. Bleeding Me (Load, 1996)
If I were putting together an album or a live set, I’d use the first three songs to build people up and get the juices flowing before bringing them down a bit with a ballad or something slower. Metallica did this a ton, as the fourth track in most of their albums was earmarked for the ballad. There are more than a handful of them on these two albums, so this was hard to pick, but Bleeding Me gets the nod here.
I’ll let James Hetfield explain why:
"Around the time of Load, I felt I wanted to stop drinking. "Maybe I'm missing out on something. Everyone else seems so happy all the time. I want to get happy." I'd plan my life around a hangover: "The Misfits are playing in town Friday night, so Saturday is hangover day." I lost a lot of days in my life. Going to therapy for a year, I learned a lot about myself. There's a lot of things that scar you when you're growing up, you don't know why. The song Bleeding Me is about that: I was trying to bleed out all bad, get the evil out. While I was going through therapy, I discovered some ugly stuff in there. A dark spot."
5. Hero of the Day (Load, 1996)
I thought about trimming this list down to ten songs, but it would have meant leaving this one off of there. I seem to recall this being the first song I ever heard from this era of the band and it might be the most uplifting-sounding track the band has ever put out. I would later come to find out it was a song about the human spirit and the different ways in which people respond to adverse times in their life. I would have ideally liked to place a heavier track here, but think it’s a nice juxtaposition with the dark and brooding song that preceded it.
6. Devil’s Dance (ReLoad, 1997)
As promised, now comes the part of the tracklist where we need to get our punch back. This is a song about temptation and to me sounds like what would happen if you took Sad But True and The God That Failed from the Black Album and put them into a blender.
7. King Nothing (Load, 1996)
This is my favorite song from this era of the band and it is so criminally slept on that it brings me physical pain to even think about. King Nothing simply kicks ass and I’ll simply leave it at that.
8. The Unforgiven II (ReLoad, 1997)
We’re bringing things back down for a bit to a darkened and contemplative state. This is a sequel to The Unforgiven from the Black Album and depending on who you speak to or where you go, it carries different meanings to different people. I’ve always taken the first song to be about a wayward soul and this track to be about that wayward soul finding someone like him. If the first song is about asking if the world can be forgiven, the second one might be about being able to open your heart to forgive someone else.
9. Carpe Diem Baby (ReLoad, 1997)
This is the part of the album where the guitars start to do some Alice in Chains-y type things and I don’t hate it. Like Hero of the Day, if I were trimming down to 10 songs this would miss the cut. Metallica never played this song live until 2011 and has only played it four times total. The second time it was played was at the Orion Music + More festival in Detroit, so having seen it there, it kind of holds a special place in my heart. This is one of the bluesier and groovier tracks on the two albums and is a definite departure from anything they had done before it.
10. Until It Sleeps (Load, 1996)
This was the other ballad in consideration for the fourth spot in the tracklisting here and was the lead single off of the album, which in turn made it everyone’s first look at the new era of the band. This is also the only song that Metallica has ever put out to crack the Billboard Top 100 when it debuted at peaked at No. 10. This is an insanely personal song to Hetfield, as it has to do with his mother’s battle with cancer. He came from a family of Christian Scientists who did not believe in treatment or medicine and that had a major effect on his songwriting. This song tackles the rage and pain of these family issues. The video and look of the band is also so spectacularly 90s.
11. Where The Wild Things Are (ReLoad, 1997)
I saw a YouTube commenter refer to this song as “if Alice in Chains tried to do their version of One” and I struggle to come up with a better way to put it. This was one of three songs in Metallica’s discography to feature a writing credit from bassist Jason Newsted (the others being Blackened and My Friend of Misery). This is right up there with the weirdest and eeriest-sounding tracks on either of the albums, but is the one that has probably grown the most on me over the years. It feels like you’re listening to a dream (or a nightmare) and I would have loved to see them put out more material like this as opposed to the amount of stock-sounding hard rock tunes that did not make the list.
12. The Outlaw Torn (Load, 1996)
This is another example of a sprawling, epic, heavy song from this era of the band with tremendous lyricism and messaging. We are ending on the grandest of scales here with a song about losing someone that is a major part of who you are and trying to find the replacement for them to fill that void that ultimately never comes. A lot of people might speculate that this is about Metallica’s late bassist Cliff Burton, but given Hetfield’s familial problems, one can see how any of those things might have been an inspiration. For me, this sums up the high point in Metallica’s transition into this new era of the band. Before, the power of the music smacked you right in the face with the guitars, drums, and bass. The Load-era songs may have been stripped of musical complexity, but the power and strength of this music comes from Hetfield’s vocal performance and songwriting.
Here’s the full Spotify playlist of the Broomedia Load album.
This will not be the last you hear from me on this band, so tailor your expectations accordingly!
That’s it for this week. I know things have been on a weird schedule in terms of the frequency of this newsletter going out. This is a hobby right now and sometimes life gets in the way! I am still working on figuring out what I want this to be and the shape it will take moving forward, as well as the type of content I might be able to provide that, would warrant a subscription model. I’m not expecting anyone to pay for access to my sandbox or journal, so do not worry about that for now! However, I would like to explore this at some point!
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