Not Quite Myself Lately
July 10, 2008 by Scott
Since I started writing for The Rock Dose, I found myself exploring more modern rock bands and actually enjoying a lot of it. That doesn’t mean I’m abandoning metal, in fact it doesn’t even mean I’m listening to less metal. It just means I’ve been listening to shit I normally wouldn’t. For instance, I bought the new Shinedown the other day titled Sound Of Madness and it’s actually a pretty good rock cd. I was sent a copy of Trapt’s new album Only Through The Pain and while that is a bit more of pop/rock it’s still not that bad.
What I did today at work was totally outside of my listening habits. I talk a lot of trash about Metallica but I still have every song from every album with the exception of St. Anger on my iPod. So I felt like listening to The Black Album and it sounded really cool. Then when that was played through I played Load and it was completely tolerable and I thought to myself…”Wow, this is a really good ROCK album”. I think that’s more or less why the metal fans don’t care for Load and Reload. Because they are pretty much rock albums and the newer Metallica fans that love those two think they are metal fans because they love them. I honestly don’t know, but I can really say that Load and Reload are good rock albums. Not metal, but rock. I would still consider them crap in the frame of mind that it’s Metallica and we expected nothing but balls to the wall metal from them and only got a couple of rock albums and something that resembled recording with Fisher Price instruments on an analog 4 track tape recorder. Either way I actually am looking forward to the upcoming Death Magnetic. I expect Rick Ruben may have got them back on track and without question, as Izzy said, they still kick ass live.
being a long running in flames fan, i’ve become pretty tolerant of when you first hear new albums. i can take or leave load, but you pretty much hit it dead on. people were expecting metallica and didn’t get the metallica they wanted.
It’s funny how a new job can open you to different types of music though, used to work at an alternative/punk store and it got me into a lot of bands i wouldn’t even have gone near beforehand.
I used to listen to a lot of rock when I was in my late teens, early 20’s, but around my late 20s I started to listen or I should say discover a lot more metal that I had no clue was out there and in the last year I have found so many amazing bands.
I’m just not a big modern rock fan. Love classic rock, but there are just not that many good modern bands.
Metallica’s early years(’83-’91) are undoubtedly the best but that doesn’t mean that Load and Reload are rubbish. A lot of people think that way because as Tate rightfully said, people were expecting the more juvenile metallica. Then again Metallica made such a different image (band members cut their hair etc) that it took all the eager fans by surprise.
Briefly:
Metallica raised the bar up here>>__
And Load/Reload reached here>>___
which is still gd but not the best xD