{"id":201734,"date":"2025-06-21T05:23:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-21T05:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/201734\/"},"modified":"2025-06-21T05:23:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-21T05:23:09","slug":"metallica-load-remastered-deluxe-box-set-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/201734\/","title":{"rendered":"Metallica: Load (Remastered Deluxe Box Set) Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Hetfield sing-grunts the word \u201cbitch\u201d six times on \u201cAin\u2019t My Bitch,\u201d the comically distasteful opening track off Metallica<\/a>\u2019s 1996 album Load, taking great pains to never pronounce it the same way twice. In the first chorus it\u2019s \u201cbiiiiii-tchah\u201d plus a kind of \u201cbeeyotch\u2026ohhhhh,\u201d while in the second chorus he goes \u201cbetch-yah,\u201d then \u201cbeyaaaaatch,\u201d followed by \u201cbiiiiiiiihiiiiiiitch-no-it-ain\u2019t-mine,\u201d and finally, a single, gleeful, guttural \u201cOOH!\u201d followed by a word that sounds like a combination of \u201cBINCH!\u201d and \u201cBELCH!\u201d on the outro. It\u2019s 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-\u201990s 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\u2019s more than a little truth to the notion that the band had found a new target for ire: its own fans. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll preconceived and preexisting ideas of who we are and what we\u2019ve done are at a point right now where we\u2019re standing at a massive potential point of rebirth,\u201d 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\u2019s recent reissue. The fact that Ulrich\u2019s statement is a little incoherent is a perfect encapsulation of how, by the mid-\u201990s, Metallica were certainly going for something, but no one, including them, was exactly sure what that something was. They\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

The drastic visual rebrand inadvertently primed Metallica\u2019s 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\u2019s cover image, a pre-existing work by the conceptual artist Andres Serrano, has been read as a provocative response to society\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"James Hetfield sing-grunts the word \u201cbitch\u201d six times on \u201cAin\u2019t My Bitch,\u201d the comically distasteful opening track off…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[31104,77,269,16,15,4715],"class_list":{"0":"post-201734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-albums","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom","13":"tag-web"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114719686982928599","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}