Metallica’s ‘ReLoad’ Super Deluxe Edition Box Set: Review

Do you want alternative? Do you want alternative? Metallica gives you alternative, bay-bee!

After the early-Nineties alt-rock explosion, bands that had made it big in the Eighties largely pulled their hair out trying to fit in. U2 went disco. Guns N’ Roses spent about 25 years chasing Chinese Democracy. And Metallica? Well, they just got weird — and, contrary to popular belief, that wasn’t a bad thing.

Neither of the quartet’s Load albums, released in 1996 and 1997, sound overtly “alt,” since James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett’s riffs owed a greater debt to the blues and Lynyrd Skynyrd than shoegaze or Pixies. But they achieved a simulacrum of “alt,” at least for headbangers, by playing with a looseness that still feels like a rejection of the white-knuckle thrashing that earned them their legend. Hetfield had learned to honest-to-God sing on 1991’s Black Album, which is when they began to smash the shackles of metal puritanism.

That chill attitude helped them shake free some interesting debris, most of which they’ve finally collected in their weighty new ReLoad box set, which contains five LPs, a seven-inch, 15 CDs, and four DVDs of Metallica at their most avant-garde (at least until they met Lou Reed). It’s a 12-pound time capsule of the unconventional.

So just how “alt” do you take your Metallica? How about a banjo-driven acoustic reworking of the Misfits’ horror-punk massacre “Last Caress” with Blues Traveler’s John Popper honking harmonica all over Hetfield’s crooned vocals about gory violence like it’s some perverse Anytown, U.S.A. barbecue? How about DJ Spooky imbuing “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with trip-hop breaks, illbient echoes, and reverso-wah on Cliff Burton’s iconic bass line? How about Rob Overseer overlaying Dave Grohl’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” drum break on “Enter Sandman”? How about heaps of photos of the guys with haircuts, guyliner, and nail polish, and CD booklets sodden with semen, blood, and piss? A few years earlier, on “Nothing Else Matters,” Hetfield sang, “Open mind for a different view,” but he never would’ve predicted just how wide his mind could open.

Even though many Metallica fans pretended to loathe the Load albums, headbangers came out for them. Load was a Number One seller in 1996, and its comelier evil twin, ReLoad, repeated the feat a year and a half later. Old heads will still sneer when you mention “Mama Said” (a country-fried, sentimental ballad fired off in Load’s first round) but if you separate Metallica 2.0 from their thrash-purist origins, you can appreciate how the holy spirit of the alternative movement guided them to record innovative songs with legacies that still reverberate throughout rock radio.

With 29 years of hindsight, ReLoad is the better of the two Loads, because Metallica took extra time to diversify their sonic palette. The quartet had worked on both albums concurrently, hoping to release everything as a double album. But with tour dates looming, they polished off 14 songs and rushed out Load. For fans, the first listen was like a hard-rock cold plunge. Its best songs brooded (“Until It Sleeps,” “Hero of the Day”), trundled (“The Outlaw Torn”), and offered unfamiliar whiplash (did tough-guy Hetfield really just sing, “It’s time to kiss ass” in the background of “Ain’t My Bitch”?). But they did not seek and destroy, at least like they used to, and it was still a straightforward hard-rock album. ReLoad showed a more nuanced side to the band’s reinvention.

Beginning with “Fuel,” a punky barnburner with a pummeling riff built for stadium fist-pumping, ReLoad now sounds like the act of a band running on piss and vinegar (and every other intoxicant they were imbibing prior to Some Kind of Monster). Marianne Faithfull’s bleating on “The Memory Remains” still sounds chilling. “Where the Wild Things Are” and its creepy, Alice in Chains–like vocal harmonies sound darker than Metallica’s heaviest fare. “Carpe Diem Baby” may be their best groove-rocker, period, bolstered by a swirling bridge that sounds like Joni Mitchell rendered hypermaximalist. And “Low Man’s Lyric,” that delicately grinding waltz with accompaniment from a hurdy-gurdy man, sounds now like Metallica’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” (but sadder and lower and with absolutely no ladies).

As with Load, which got an even bigger box set last year, there’s still a lot of filler here. “The Unforgiven II” and its exorbitant “the’s” (“If you can understand the me/Then I can understand the you”) is only marginally forgivable. The stomping riffs and growls of “Devil’s Dance,” meanwhile, portended the landscape of generic post-nu-metal bands like Godsmack and Disturbed. “Attitude” lacks, well, attitude, especially since the hook goes, “Whatever happened to sweat?” As with many double albums (ahem, GN’R’s Use Your Illusions), Load and ReLoad have the songs between them to make up a single four-and-a-half-star album, had Metallica judiciously whittled down the track list and immersed themselves in their newfound other-ness.

The group’s musical soul-searching is what gets most attention in the ReLoad box set. A sticker, like the one on the original Load that reported the album had 78:59 of music (the total capacity for a single CD), says this one runs 1697:47, or about two hours less than the Load box. The box set also includes colorful posters, Rorschach ink blots (how very Nineties!), guitar picks, and a hardcover book. Nothing can prepare you for the album art writ large on the inside flap, but the lavish haircut photos galore and commentary from folks like producer Bob Rock and then-bassist Jason Newsted are illuminating. “Overall, these many years later and after my re-engagement with ReLoad, I still feel victorious … I did what I came to do. We did what we came to do,” Newsted writes. (One complaint: Where are the insights from Hetfield, Hammett, and Lars Ulrich?)

Some of the most interesting material can be found in the tidbits and demos of songs as the quartet figured out how strange they could get: the ghostlike backing moans on the 1995 mix of “Fuel for Fire” (later titled just “Fuel”), Faithfull’s hair-raising vocal outtakes, Hammett’s noise textures on the ’97 rough mix of “The Memory Remains,” the monk-like guttural chanting on “Skimpy,” the “Carpe Diem Baby” demo, the sheer heavy Neurosis-like power of “Bastard – ‘Bad Seed’ Riff II,’” the Robert Smith-like guitar on the “Mine Eyes” (“Low Man’s Lyric”) demo, the way the Diamond Head-meets-Skynyrd obsession that led to “The Four Horsemen” also produced ReLoad’s “Prince Charming.”

The collection’s four “Shadowcast” discs collect these moments and related apocrypha like unused bluesy guitar solos, versions of songs with alternate lyrics, and other oddities that show just how far down the rabbit hole Metallica went between the 1995 sessions for both Loads and their return to the songs in 1997. But the best of Metallica’s strange and unusual detours lies in the collection’s two “Poor Acoustic Me” discs, which collect the group’s performance at Neil Young’s Bridge School benefit in 1997 — check Hammett’s bluesy solo on “Last Caress” here — and some odd acoustic performances for radio.

The group’s 1997 appearance on KSJO, which captured them jollying up “Last Caress” with Popper, finds them playing with members of Alice in Chains (a year after the “Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Friends Haircuts” incident), Primus’ Les Claypool on banjo, Chris Isaak (on “Nothing Else Matters,” of course), and Skynyrd’s Gary Rossington. Everybody sounds happy, and it’s all so bizarre, so eclectic, so Nineties.

The big rock concerts included on several CDs and DVDs also capture the moment well. Hammett’s avant-garde sound design on the Load and ReLoad songs finally gets a spotlight thanks to the rawness of the live mixes (check any “The Memory Remains” or “Bleeding Me” for Hammett’s ear candy), and it’s fun to hear Metallica quote music from both “Mrs. Robinson” and “Highway Star” in the opening jam to the Ministry of Sound show. Metallica’s songs have always taken on new dimensions live, and everything from Load and ReLoad sounds bigger here.

You can hear (and see on the DVDs) how excited the musicians were to play the new songs and how they sometimes sounded bored on the older songs, with Hetfield indulging ironic vocal sneers at times. (How bored were they? Well, they condensed their first two albums into a “Kill/Ride Medley,” and they gave “Master of Puppets” a Friends haircut by shearing off the middle section and everything after.) Mostly, though, they had fun discovering new sides of themselves.

But this didn’t last. Even though the albums sold in the millions (Load is quintuple platinum, ReLoad quadruple platinum), Metallica noted their fans’ disdain and attempted to correct their course by going back to their roots, literally, with the covers record Garage Inc. in 1998, repackaging their original Misfits and Diamond Head covers alongside newly recorded renditions of hard-rock and metal songs (including the “Tuesday’s Gone” they recorded at KSJO), and a Nick Cave cover. Then came 2003’s St. Anger, a near total breakdown, Rick Rubin, and Metallica’s own thrash revival.

The new albums have been thrashy and great, and Metallica have largely distanced themselves from the Loads, keeping only “Fuel” and “The Memory Remains” in active rotation on their set lists. But they still get weird occasionally with acoustic shows and gigs with symphonies. Relistening to ReLoad and everything that surrounds it now supports the cliché that you must lose yourself to find yourself. Love it or hate it, though, when Metallica lost themselves, they found themselves more truly and more strange. And they will never sound that way again.