James Hetfield sing-grunts the word “bitch” six times on “Ain’t My Bitch,” the comically distasteful opening track off Metallica’s 1996 album Load, taking great pains to never pronounce it the same way twice. In the first chorus it’s “biiiiii-tchah” plus a kind of “beeyotch…ohhhhh,” while in the second chorus he goes “betch-yah,” then “beyaaaaatch,” followed by “biiiiiiiihiiiiiiitch-no-it-ain’t-mine,” and finally, a single, gleeful, guttural “OOH!” followed by a word that sounds like a combination of “BINCH!” and “BELCH!” on the outro. It’s this kind of psychotic attention to completely unnecessary detail that helped Metallica establish themselves as the progenitors of a particularly brutal brand of thrash throughout the 1980s, as well as spend the mid-’90s and early 2000s just as adeptly dismantling almost every iota of that goodwill. Metallica were iconoclasts, waging perpetual war against eardrums, the music industry, their peers, and even their own members. And with Load, there’s more than a little truth to the notion that the band had found a new target for ire: its own fans. It’s the slow album, the sellout move, the hard rock record whose packaging was littered with deliberate provocations. And now, there is more of it than ever.
“All preconceived and preexisting ideas of who we are and what we’ve done are at a point right now where we’re standing at a massive potential point of rebirth,” declared Lars Ulrich in an interview with the official Metallica fan club magazine leading up to the original album, which appears in the 128-page book accompanying the box set edition of Load’s recent reissue. The fact that Ulrich’s statement is a little incoherent is a perfect encapsulation of how, by the mid-’90s, Metallica were certainly going for something, but no one, including them, was exactly sure what that something was. They’d scrapped their original, unfathomably cool logo for something blandly modern, the spiky typographical flourishes on the M and A of the original sanded off in favor of a sans serif containing only a hint of the danger. They got haircuts, trendy ones, which for reasons too convoluted to get into, infuriated their fanbase.
The drastic visual rebrand inadvertently primed Metallica’s audience for the sound of Load itself, which cast off even the barest vestiges of their thrash past and was instead chock-full of unsettlingly lumbering riffs, boogie-woogie-oogie solos, talk box fart sounds, spoken word drivel, a heavy Skynyrd influence, and even a straight-up country song. Load’s cover image, a pre-existing work by the conceptual artist Andres Serrano, has been read as a provocative response to society’s newfound paranoia about the body and its functions amid the AIDS crisis, or perhaps an exercise in intermingling symbols of life and death, creativity and decay. It is also, textually, a picture of blood intermingling with jizz. Such is the duality of Metallica, a band who even and perhaps especially at their best walked the fine line between totalizing brilliance and knuckle-dragging brutality.
And now, Metallica have taken it upon themselves to give Load the ultra-deluxe reissue treatment, as they have previous records, trotting out remastered editions in every format and at every price point you can think of, from a $15 cassette to a $275, 301-song box set that includes five LPs, 15 CDs, four DVDs, and the aforementioned 128-page book. I am shocked that they didn’t think to name that one the Overload Edition, especially given the fact that the Metallica merch store is currently selling a throw pillow printed with the words “Live. Laugh. Load.” in an uncomfortably drippy font.
Some context. Metallica’s 1991 self-titled record, commonly referred to as The Black Album, sold a bajillion copies and cemented Metallica as a force to be reckoned with, a full-on stadium outfit bigger and badder and meaner than the hair metal doofuses they’d spent the ’80s raging against, elbowing their way into the sort of ubiquity that ensured even people who’d fought in World War II knew who they were. The fact that they were a metal band whose name contained the word “metal” probably helped, sure, but they could have been called “Jazzica” and we’d still be hearing the “Enter Sandman” riff before high school football games. Another crucial bit of context: The Black Album inadvertently had the timing of a Tyrese Haliburton buzzer-beater, dropping just weeks ahead of Nirvana’s Nevermind, an alternative rock juggernaut whose sales would trigger a hard reset in the heavy music landscape.
Still, their place in the pantheon secured, Metallica took a three-and-a-half-year, four-tour victory lap after The Black Album, a bombastic, old-school rock star gesture that included headlining both Woodstock ’94 and the fall of the Soviet Union. Behind the scenes, they were undergoing a rebirth. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett re-entered civilian life to study at San Francisco State and took up jazz guitar. Rhythm guitarist and vocalist James Hetfield explored the work of singer-songwriters, like Leonard Cohen, who he’d once dismissed due to their inherent lack of heaviness, and also spent a bunch of time in the woods. Drummer Lars Ulrich indulged his love of business by attempting to renegotiate Metallica’s contract with Elektra and also developed a borderline-unhealthy infatuation with Oasis. Bassist Jason Newsted, a Metallica superfan who’d famously been brought in to replace the deceased Cliff Burton only to have his contributions mixed out of …And Justice for All, set up a recording studio and started messing around with collaborators outside of the band, a habit that would eventually contribute to his departure and/or dismissal from the group.
When it came time to reunite for the sessions that would eventually become Load, the group surveyed how the heavy music landscape had evolved in the intervening years and found much of it dominated by a sort of post-Melvins sludge that, if not exactly in Metallica’s wheelhouse, was absolutely an idiom they could work within. Groups like Kyuss, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains had hit paydirt in part by appealing to metalheads and alt-rock fans, while the commercial ascendence of hip-hop had demonstrated a marketwide demand for audible bass. Hell, their contemporaries in Pantera had pulled off a hard pivot to groove metal and were more popular than ever—why couldn’t Metallica do something similar?
They decamped for the studio, armed with ideas and a nominally anything-goes, anyone-can-contribute attitude that ran counter to Ulrich and Hetfield’s usual totalitarian approach to composition and recording. In practice, this mainly meant allowing Hammett to expand his role as the band’s soloist into that of Hetfield’s rhythm guitar partner. Where Hetfield would once lay down his signature riffs and then beef them out by doubling over them, Hammett now provided a counterpoint, adding depth, texture, and looseness to a sound whose main goal had simply been to punch the listener in the face until they cried “uncle.” Urged on by Bob Rock, the same producer who’d helmed the boards for The Black Album, and drunk off the spirit of their own creativity, Metallica recorded more than enough material for a double album, their adventurism hampered only by the pace at which Hetfield could write lyrics.
The songs that resulted from these sessions sound like exactly what they are: a band too big to fail and allergic to the word “no” attempting to go in a million directions at once, embracing blues and country while also giving into self-indulgent experimentation and abstraction, and simultaneously updating its sound for modern audiences without overtly alienating its core metal audience more than it already had. All of this, the country ballads, the stabs at modern rock radio, the butt-rock and Southern stoner metal, got jammed into the blender that was Bob Rock’s uncomfortably clean production, resulting in an album that’s both in-your-face and deeply unsure of its identity. Faced with a looming deadline to turn the record in, Metallica saved half of the material for a sequel, Reload, but were still able to jam in as much music as was technically possible to fit onto a single CD, eventually incorporating the album’s bloated, 79-minute runtime into its marketing materials. It was as if Coca-Cola had tried to hype up New Coke by selling it exclusively in kegs.
Curiously enough, the only Metallica member to contribute to the behind-the-scenes book accompanying the new Load box set is now-departed bassist Jason Newsted, who while more than gracious in his retelling of the album’s story, is limited in his perspective: he was frequently relegated to his own room in the studio, with its own entrance, where, with the aid of engineer Randy Straub and a bong, he’d knock out a bassline or two per day, occasionally get some tepid approval from from Hetfield (who was annoyed by all the weed smoke), then go off and ride his mountain bike. Newsted writes that, amid all the change swirling around him, he would serve as “the perplexed fan’s representative.” The core Metallica audience, he felt, wasn’t “ready to hear [them] sounding like more typical hard rock and roll music.” And despite raising concerns to his bandmates—namely, “Dude, what the fuck are we doing?”—Newsted ultimately fell in line, wanting, God bless him, “to be the reliable and supportive BASE and BASS.”
If there’s one good thing about this reissue, it shows that Load wasn’t necessarily the sudden, out-of-nowhere gesture that the band’s revamped image, headlined by the aforementioned haircuts as well as press shots that Ulrich commissioned from U2’s photographer Anton Corbijn featuring the band in makeup, made it out to be. The tracks that made their way into the setlists of the multiple live albums included in the box set blend seamlessly with the classics—“King Nothing” becomes a midtempo utility player, capable of transitioning from the crescendos of “Fade to Black” or into the solemn intro of “One,” while “Until it Sleeps” makes a hell of a lot more sense as a lead-in to “For Whom the Bell Tolls” than as the single that was supposed to reignite Metallica fever. Elsewhere, we get an EP’s worth of pretty fantastic Motörhead covers recorded while Metallica rehearsed for their legendary 1995 gig at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go to celebrate Lemmy’s 50th birthday, both a curio for fans as well as a reminder that even if Load wasn’t a direct descendent of the band’s previous work, the two approaches at least shared a common ancestor. We also get some electronica remixes of Load’s singles, including one of “Until It Sleeps” courtesy of Moby’s Herman Melville alter ego, which interested parties simply must experience if only to understand that Load could have been so much worse: think a multi-genre mashup on par with U2’s Pop, except it’s starting at the Judgment Night soundtrack and grasping to find the midpoint between Skynyrd and Underworld.
And even the dourest stinkers in Metallica’s catalog—yes, that includes Lulu—can’t help but sneak a few bangers in. The brooding “Until It Sleeps” is, in a vacuum, an earworm of the highest order, even if its washed-out, vaguely ren-faire-ass music video feels like the model for a thousand post-grunge album covers that would come after. “Poor Twisted Me” lurches and struts and swaggers, the guitar lick sounding enough like Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” that it’s not entirely crazy to wonder if she and Mutt Lange ripped it off. On “Wasting My Hate,” the band works its way into something resembling vintage form, even if Hetfield’s amped-up grunts come off as simply goofily endearing. “The Outlaw Torn” is one of Metallica’s all-time great album closers, a nearly 10-minute extravaganza of dueling guitars, solos that oscillate between hypnotic and unholy, and a vocal performance from Hetfield that’s a potent reminder that the guy’s got one of the best sets of pipes in rock. The Black Album’s cover may have unintentionally (?) ripped off Spinal Tap’s Smell the Glove, but at least in retrospect, Load is by no means the band’s Shark Sandwich.
Load was the first misstep of many Metallica would make over the mid-’90s and early aughts, including quickly following it up with the even less well-received Reload and then documenting the dull, wet thuds of St. Anger in front of a camera crew for the deeply embarrassing (for them) cinematic masterpiece (for everyone else) that is Some Kind of Monster. But as the band aged and began pumping out albums that, while not exactly good, were at least recognizably Metallica, the goodwill they’d once squandered returned. Metallica may be a global brand at least as recognizable as, say, Chilli’s, but at least it’s a beloved one. Now, as they bask in the warm glow of being the heaviest classic rock band standing, they ask us to reconsider Load, the once-shining turd of their catalog, with the grace that hindsight can provide. Is it still kind of a mess? Sure. But how many artists these days are willing to risk derailing their own careers just because they can? There is dignity in flagrant, unnecessary failure. It provides a narrative tension that is all but absent from the career arcs of contemporary stars. After all, every hero must overcome a challenge, even a self-created one, in order to transcend.
