Metallica - Load (1996) - Bore Inc.: Oddballs in a wasted space - 33% (08/11/14)

Five years after a repetitive and dull but commercially successful groove metal release in the form of "Metallica", the same band comes around with a headless and boring but once again well selling successor entitled "Load". At least Metallica didn't try to copy the sound of the famous predecessor, but to progress and try out new things. Thrash and groove metal elements are almost completely absent on this album. The band headed for a more blues, hard and southern rock influenced sound. This record also includes the first two Metallica songs that feature no guitar solo at all. To underline its new approach, the band went even further and presented a new and ordinary looking new logo and came around with a controversial cover artwork which consists of a mixture of bovine blood and human semen pressed between two sheets of plexiglass. All these somewhat radical changes speak for some sort of midlife crisis of the band and a desperate try to reinvent themselves after the overwhelming success of the past years. Old school fans were going to hate this album anyway but from the artist's point of view, this brave new direction could have brought some fresh air to the band in a time where relationships between the members already started to decrease. While "Reload" sounded surprisingly liberating, open-minded and structured with its southern rock influenced style, "Load" suffers from an directionless, unimpressive and weak song writing. The album is not only completely overloaded with a running time of seventy-nine minutes but many songs are at least two or three minutes too long and turn out being either endlessly plodding or losing the momentum of the few good ideas present on this release. In fact, there isn't one single track on here that completely pleases me. The better songs on the album have a few creative ideas in form of some atmospheric tones, a few great guitar licks, riffs or solos or some newly introspective lyrics but there isn't one single song without any obvious flaws.

Among the better tracks on the record is first of all the joyous yet mean opening rocker "Ain't My Bitch" that features an energizing rhythm section and a great blues rock inspired guitar solo. On the other side, the track is slightly too long for being a straight opener, the vocal performance sounds humorously exaggerated and the lyrics are quite vapid as well. Five years earlier, this track would have been a bonus track for a single at best and now it's one of the few solid tracks on the entire album. The plodding "The House Jack Built" goes the other way around as the lyrics are quite interesting and the eerie vocal effects build up a particular atmosphere. The overtly experimental instrumental section with talkbox effects is though laughable at best and really pesky at worst. This song also drags on for far too long with its chugging riffs and pseudo-progressive sounds. "Until It Sleeps" was a quite courageous choice as a first single to represent this release as it has nothing to do at all with the band's past and also feels like a foreign body on this album. It's an alternative rock song with an eerie and hypnotizing atmosphere but which fails to truly develop from there. "Mama Said" is a laid back country ballad with acoustic guitars that develops a certain campfire atmosphere. What could have been a truly original track is harmed by an extremely drowsy chorus and annoyingly whiny lyrics.

All other songs are not even worth mentioning because they sound invalidated, plodding and unspectacular. As they are all terrible, it doesn't make sense to point out any of those confusing, overlong and weak oddities. It really strikes me how the band succeeded most of its experiments on the consistent, energizing and entertaining "Reload" while "Load" is its complete antithesis and sounds inconsistent, directionless and plain boring. The songs on here are not as bad as several tracks on the oddball that was "Lulu" but even this horrible project still had two or three entirely decent tracks which isn't the case for this album as it sounds really unimpressive as a whole. Between a record that has a few great tracks and many truly horrible songs and filler compilation that leaves you completely cold, it's actually quite tough to judge what is worse and that's why my final rating of this failure here could have been even lower than it actually is. In the end, I would still slightly prefer this record to "Lulu" but it's a close run. This album was a disappointment when it was initially released back in the days and in comparison to its much better twin album "Reload", this record didn't age well and didn't grow on me at all. I would simply suggest you to just avoid this record at all costs if you're not a diehard collector with too much money to waste.