(#550: 15 June 1996, 1 week)
Track listing: Ain’t My Bitch/2 X 4/The House Jack Built/Until It Sleeps/King Nothing/Hero Of The Day/Bleeding Me/Cure/Poor Twisted Me/Wasting My Hate/Mama Said/Thorn Within/Ronnie/The Outlaw Torn
It was not really possible for Metallica to be equalled, let alone bettered, but after five years the band were keen to try. Consequently they recorded enough songs to fill two very long albums, and as is usually the case (though not invariably so), there was one fairly good album lurking within all the excess baggage.
One would have imagined a disciplinarian producer of the calibre of Bob Rock to lay down a law or seven, but, as has been said elsewhere, a producer can only work with the material they have been given. In addition, the packaging looked tawdry – the Andres Serrano cover artwork (or quotation – it is actually a reproduction of Serrano’s 1990 piece “Semen and Blood III”) indicated that they were trying too hard, as was the ill-advised dressing-up photography within the cover; a lot of fans were put off by the latter. They weren’t expecting U2 postmodernist japes.
Load takes a while to get going – the record is literally overloaded. The opening song, the title of which I will not do the dignity of reproducing here, is a gruff rerun of “My Sharona” despite its attempts to fly into Foo Fighters airspace. The second song is tedious, smelly blues-boogie. The unpromisingly-named “The House Jack Built” endeavours to retrieve the classic Metallica template but is fatally sabotaged by what sounds like James Hetfield vomiting into a guitar talk box (in 1996!). This was not what Kurt had died for.
At this point, the album does wake up to an extent. Remarkably – who would have guessed? – the songs which sound most like Metallica work the best, and Load’s next four songs, while not scaling the heights of anything on its predecessor, are unimpeachable. The manner in which Hetfield manages to express the phrase “so-HOLD-ME-EY-EH” eight different ways in “Until It Sleeps” is quite masterly, as is the snarling emphasis placed on the “Careful what you wish/You may regret it” section of “King Nothing.”
On the other hand, there are occasions when the band try something un-Metallica-like and succeed. The working title of “Hero Of The Day” was “Mouldy” because the song sounded to them like something latterday Bob Mould might do. Hetfield doesn’t quite square his priapic growl with Mould’s nasal yearning, but the song would not have disgraced Sugar’s File Under Easy Listening – a record subsequently disowned by both its creator and the record company boss who released it, but I thought and still think that it’s rather splendid – and cumulatively probably Load’s most sinister song, given the very slow and subtle rise of sinister elements, culminating in the dramatic turnaround that accompanies the lines “But now the dreams and waking screams/That ever last the night/So build the wall, behind it crawl/And hide until it's light/So can you hear your babies crying now?” – words which in the Britain of September 2024 bear a terrible resonance.
“Bleeding Me” – and you can’t really get away from Chris Cornell, let alone Kurt – really is Metallica at their finest, brilliantly constructed with an unexpected mid-song about-turn; just as you thought it was over, along rolls further, bloodier thunder. Hear how drums and voice tumble in unison through the whirlpool of “OH, I CAN’T TAKE IT!” You can’t learn that level of symbiosis.
The album then dips again. “Cure” isn’t too bad but is vaguely pointless (whereas “Until It Sleeps” surprisingly works because in its verses the band sound a bit like The Cure). One message board wag described “Poor Twisted Me” as being “like George Thorogood gone flaccid” and I certainly cannot disagree with that succinct summation. “Wasting My Hate” (“And I won’t waste my hate on you…/think I’ll keep it for myself, YEAH!”) is, however, moderately funny and would have worked on a rejigged Load as comparative light relief.
“Mama Said” is a very earnest effort to pull off a country-rock ballad; muted and well thought-out, if slightly redundant in this setting – Hetfield uses the song to articulate thoughts about his relationship with his mother, who died of cancer when Hetfield was sixteen. It doesn’t attain the ambiguous heights of George Michael's similarly-themed “You Have Been Loved.” But “Thorn Within” is my favourite track and the most directly “Metallica” song on the record – a great riff, lots of unapologetic power.
One does have to say no to the wearisome Black Crowes retread of “Ronnie” – especially when set against the surprising imagination and enterprise of the same year’s Three Snakes And One Charm – but the closing “The Outlaw Torn,” in part apparently about the ghost in the band’s own cupboard, Cliff Burton, and takes the album out satisfactorily; the song’s handling of quiet-LOUD-quiet dynamics calls “I Want You/She’s So Heavy” to mind. As with the latter, “The Outlaw Torn” ends before it finishes, so to speak, but whereas Lennon cheerfully sliced the tape of “Want/Heavy” to wind the pseuds up – and wouldn’t it, let us be honest with ourselves, have been a profound disappointment if we had ever heard the actual end of that song? – “The Outlaw Torn” is faded early because there was no more room for it on the CD (the album runs for 78 minutes and 59 seconds – but how much filler could have been excised?), so I listened to the full “Unencumbered By Manufacturing Restrictions Version” which appears on the CD single of “The Memory Remains” and restores the song’s closing fifty-five seconds; while there is no major revelation to be heard, the song does actually come to a conclusion, and therefore wraps up the album’s proceedings pretty naturally.
It has to be wondered whether there was really any room for Metallica in 1996. The band say they were inspired by the work of many other artists when they put Load together, some of whom are perhaps unexpected (Oasis, Alanis Morisette, Garth Brooks – although in the context of “Mama Said” the latter does make a degree of sense). But when you compare it to other major hard rock albums of the time, it is possibly found wanting. It avoids the bluff cheek of Corrosion Of Conformity’s Wiseblood, it largely forsakes the technical cunning which underlies Rush’s rather fine Test For Echo, and it completely lacks the shattering power of Pantera’s The Great Southern Trendkill – there is nothing here to compare with “Floods” (“the vast sound of tuning out” indeed). Nor, if we take things outside 1996, is it as pop as Soundgarden’s Superunknown.
Some have argued that Load would have worked reasonably well as a side project. As a major album, however, it is somewhat out of its time. In 1997 a second, slightly shorter album entitled ReLoad was released; it is not addressed in this tale, as it only peaked at number four in Britain, but shares the same dilemma of excellent songs obscured by layers of barely passable filler (my picks: “Fuel,” “The Memory Remains” with its Marianne Faithfull not-yet-a-ghost cameo, “Carpe Diem Baby,” “Where The Wild Things Are,” “Low Man’s Lyric,” “Fixxxer”). Assemble a playlist of the best of both albums; then you’d have had a worthy follow-up, even to a previous album which almost demanded that it not be followed up.
