Load is the sixth studio album by Metallica. From the beginning it was meant to be a double albu as the band has way too many songs to fit just one disc. Later, the result became two separate albums though – Load and Reload, which was release in 1997, but more about that later.
When it first came out Metallica needed to fill som pretty big shoes since the previous self-titled album still to this day is their most commercially successful album. I liked about half of the previous album really good, the other half wasn’t music that I associated with Metallica at the time. So, I was half disappointed. When Load came though, It was a disaster for me. There was nothing left of what those early album had given me. It wasn’t Thrash Metal, and it certainly wasn’t Speed Metal.
I think I gave it a couple of chances but could never really get into it. But now, as I’m on a quest to cover their entire discography, I was forced to go back and re-freshen my memory. I don’t hate it anymore! That doesn’t mean that I love it either. In my mind it’s still an album that doesn’t hold a candle to those earlier albums.
But when I repeated Load a few times to really try to get into the songs, some of them are really not that bad. I don’t find them particularly memorable and I sure couldn’t hum them if my life depended on it. But as long as the music plays it’s quite ok, especially the first half of Load I think. There are, in fact, more melodies and simplicity than the most complexed albums of their discography, Master of Puppets and …and Justice For All.
So, as they intended to create something they haden’t done before, they sure succeeded. Load opened up to another audience. It also closed som doors to the die-hard fans of the old stuff though. Even today, I hear people from both sides, some praising their bold move, while others despise it.
For me, I have probably matured, just as Metallica did with this album. It’s not as bad as I once thought, when my disappointment spoke the loudest. It’s actually quite ok.
