In listening to Metallica’s first studio album in five years, “Load” (Elektra), out this week, it’s hard to believe this is the same band whose innovations put the snarl back in metal. But that’s exactly what the San Francisco quartet did throughout the 1980s.
Along with American contemporaries such as Slayer, Megadeth and later Anthrax, Metallica revivified heavy metal in the last decade by consolidating the advances made in the 1970s by Britain’s revolutionary if widely reviled Motorhead.
Dispensing with Dungeons and Dragons lyrics, windy guitar solos and sludgy tempos, Metallica introduced a new era of speed metal. Dispensing with fantasy, the band offered unsentimental depictions of social outcasts from teen dropouts to mass murderers, and the music regained its sense of danger, daring and relevance. This was metal’s version of punk rock, a brutal, buzzing response from the alienated fringe to the commercially dominant, artistically vapid hair and glam bands of the ’80s such as Bon Jovi, Winger, Poison and Motley Crue.
Metallica became one of the ’80s greatest underground success stories — selling millions of records through constant touring and word-of-mouth endorsement from a widening worldwide cult.
With the 1991 “Metallica,” the group crafted its most accessible record with shorter, tighter, more melodic songs and clearer, punchier sound, in collaboration with Motley Crue producer Bob Rock. The record went on to sell 9 million copies and established Metallica as the biggest hard-rock band in the world, selected to headline the prime Saturday night slot at Woodstock ’94 and, in the ultimate crossover move, this summer’s Lollapalooza festival, once an event that was the exclusive province of alternative bands.
But Metallica has never seemed more mainstream than it does now. In contrast to recent hard-rock/metal releases by Rage Against the Machine and Pantera, “Load” sounds tame. That’s not to say the group has suddenly abandoned its trademark crunch for crooning power ballads, but the production, again by Bob Rock, sounds strangely dated — a throwback to the contoured metal of the mid-’80s. While Metallica still writes some of the toughest, most memorable riffs in metaldom, “Load” doesn’t put them across with any particular fury.
The record’s rounded edges put the emphasis on the group’s songwriting and arranging, which have improved in a commercial sense. Long gone are the labyrinthine arrangements and jagged tempos of the 1986 “Master of Puppets” and the 1988 “. . . And Justice For All.” In their place are a musicality that now embraces a twangy pedal steel guitar, a softened lilt in James Hetfield’s once growled vocals, and a steady stream of more deliberately paced tempos.
Metallica can no longer be considered a speed-metal band. Instead what it most resembles is a mid-’70s hard-rock outfit: “2 X 4” attempts a bit of a greasy Aerosmith-like groove, “Ronnie” appropriates a bluesy Savoy Brown riff, “Till It Sleeps” aspires to the grandeur of a Led Zeppelin ballad.
But even though “Load” is easily the band’s least innovative album, it is far from an embarrassment. With a couple of exceptions, such as the blustery 10 minutes of “The Outlaw Torn,” the tunes are built on tough, sturdy melodies and gutsy riffs, particularly “King Nothing,” which uncoils with menace, and “Cure,” a pithy dose of bluesy bile.
But it’s Hetfield’s growing confidence and command as a singer and lyricist that are the disc’s most impressive features. The album is perhaps Metallica’s most introspective, with Hetfield staring down the demons within — “Ain’t gonna waste my hate on you/Think I’ll keep it for myself” — while flashing a previously unnoticed sense of humor on “Poor Twisted Me”: “Such a burden to be poor mistreated me.”
His willingness to actually sing — in a husky, soulful croon — without succumbing to mushy sentimentality brings unexpected poignance to “Mama Said,” with a pedal steel guitar providing counterpoint. A song about finally snapping the smothering apron strings of home, “Mama Said” could have been a typically brutal exercise in self-flagellation. Instead, it’s all the braver because it does not flinch from its own bittersweet beauty. How odd that Metallica’s boldest stroke in the mid-’90s would be the aural equivalent of a caress rather than a kick.
Savage gods
With the 14 songs on its new album, “Undisputed Attitude” (American), clocking in at 33 brutally succinct minutes, less than half the length of “Load,” Slayer reasserts that, unlike Metallica, it is pretty much the same speed-metal band it was when it began, in 1982. Slayer still serves up venomous lyrics about vicious people at vicious tempos, augmented by deranged guitar solos that emerge from the midsections of songs like screeching poltergeists.
This time, the forum is a series of mostly decade-old hard-core punk songs, originally done by the likes of Minor Threat, TSOL and Verbal Abuse. The album is fleshed out by one new Slayer song, yet another ode to yet another serial killer, “Gemini.”
Although not a punk band, Slayer clearly drew inspiration from the early ’80s Los Angeles hard-core scene, and has sustained a career built on punk’s do-it-yourself-and-blow-off-everyone-else ethos and terse, testosterone-pumped sound. That natural affinity is broadcast on “Undisputed Attitude,” with its shatteringly intense, densely packed blasts of mayhem. In keeping with the band’s obsession with victimizers rather than victims, dominators rather than the dominated, the quartet transforms the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” into “I’m Gonna Be Your God.” Slayer already is — in the underworld of speed metal at least — and after a series of mediocre, marking-time releases, has delivered an album worthy of the attitude.
– Former Sun-Times pop critic Jim DeRogatis was one of a handful of bright young editors hired by Rolling Stone less than a year ago, ostensibly to bring a fresher, hipper perspective to the magazine’s music section. DeRogatis’ touch was evident in the handful of stories he authored — including profiles of Chicago popsters Yum-Yum and Australian indie-rock legend Richard Davies — and in his album reviews, which championed obscure bands such as Ride while savaging J. Mascis and the Dave Matthews Band.
But DeRogatis’ contempt for Baby Boomer bands, from Hootie & the Blowfish to the Rolling Stones, made at least one enemy at the publication: publisher Jann Wenner, who pulled the writer’s scathing review of the new Hootie album at the last minute and substituted it with a more conciliatory critique by another writer.
DeRogatis was fired last week after publicly tweaking his boss in an interview. While his outspokenness made his firing inevitable, his attitude about mainstream performers was never a secret, and calls into question why Rolling Stone hired DeRogatis in the first place.
