Metallica
Re-Load

Dear DeBaser, the one who only reviews Kiss is back, but surprise! This time your Kissarmy reviews a (I won’t add adjectives) Metallica album: 'Re-Load'…

1996/7: In '96, Metallica released an album 'Load', which, if it hadn’t been “branded” Metallica, would have been a beautiful record, but unfortunately, our thrashers messed it up by releasing a mediocre album, but not to be despised. They made a mistake, but we all do... Too bad Metallica are repeat offenders and perhaps make the same mistake with the following 'Re-load' which I am now going to review…

The album in question is 'Re-load', a product with a strong commercial impact and in some cases commercial… The cover looks good even though I didn’t understand what it depicts, yet the cover intrigues me and I don’t care about the album's title. The album starts off more than well with "Fuel": powerful riff, detuned guitar, and Lars Ulrich more incisive than ever; the song is very good obviously, but it’s not part of the 'tallica that existed from 1983 to 1991… The second track can be loved and hated: “The Memory remains," nice (in my opinion) and decently constructed. Of course, you can no longer see the Metallica of old in these songs but "new Metallica": short hair, new logo, and thrash completely disappeared from their songs, which was their trademark. Anyway, moving on to the third song: "Devil's Dance", what can I say, Metallica seems to be really back, not as thrashers but at least they still know how to construct songs worthy of their name: Newsted's bass in this track is raw, powerful, very present.

“The unforgiven II” is the fourth track, nice, nice, and again, nice, but now Metallica have completely forgotten the meaning of thrash metal!! The fact is that the fifth song starts to play: "Better than you”, it's very nice, I don't know why, but it vaguely reminds me of an old song that isn't theirs… It takes little to contradict the good intentions of the first four songs by putting a useless and repetitive track on the list "Slither", tasteless, an unnecessary track from the first to the last second where Metallica's excessive commercialism is felt. Once again, repetitive songs like "Bad seed", "Carpe diem baby", but it is in these tracks that excessive commercialism and the failure of their change, sealed by the haircut and new logo, as previously mentioned, can be seen. The next track is another filler song "Where the wild things are" leading to a real song "Prince Charming": well-constructed, it almost makes you miss the good old Metallica of the "Black album".

Up to this point, Metallica have shown that without thrash they manage to ruin their own songs and just for a change, they put a song on the tracklist that sounds more like the Doors than Metallica "Low man’s lyrics", the result is terrible, but it's worth noting the good musicality of the track, which, if it hadn’t been branded Metallica, would have been good. I’ll repeat this phrase endlessly for this album, which all in all isn’t completely dismissible. "Attitude" is the next song and is in perfect Re-Load style: the guitars are present and Hammett won’t stop using that effect called "wah-wah", the most common among guitar effects. The last song concludes one of Metallica's worst albums "Fixxxer", which makes you miss the past a bit, but the attempt of the four to extend its duration turned out to be not very useful and even repetitive.

After this CD, I come to a conclusion: every living being makes mistakes, Metallica have made mistakes and have done so four times with four different albums: "Load", "Re-load", "Garage Inc.", and "St. Anger". It's just hoped that with the last album to be released in spring, there may be a possible return to thrash… I sincerely hope so, because otherwise Metallica has already signed the end of their musical career...

Greetings to you all!!

Kissarmy