What's wrong with the Black Album (Metallica)?

That isn't the reason most people who loved the first 4 hated the black album. If the music was rewarding over time a lot of fans would have grown to love the album and eventually appreciated that the band was bold enough to try a new direction. We still haven't warmed up to it because the music just isn't that good. It's not because it ain't thrash. It's because it mostly sucks.

 

Devolving, more like it.

 

Well your opinion is simply incorrect. Plenty of people have warmed up to it. If that hadn't been the case, Metallica wouldn't be routinely selling out stadiums 25 years later, because of that album. So yes, it is because metalheads hated the more polished sound over the more hardcore prior albums, and it's cool to hate on anything that is popular (see Guns N' Roses).

 

How old are you?

 

It has too many 'meh' songs. Holier Than Thou, The Struggle Within, Through The Never, all nothing songs. No Metallica album before it had three songs of that low quality. Then there's My Friend Of Misery, The God That Failed, Don't Tread On Me. Just not good songs. Six out of twelve songs are inferior.

I love The Unforgiven and Nothing Else Matters. I wasn't even a big fan at the time (though I did see that tour). So I don't look at in terms of selling out. It's just by far the weakest album they'd done to that point by a good margin. It's all about the songs and they just didn't have enough of them on that album.

 

The biggest problem is that it got super popular. A lot of people still liked it until "Nothing Else Matters" was on MTV every 20 minutes.

 

The Metallica fans who are only fans of the thrash albums (S/T, Master, and Ride) are some of the whiniest and most narrow-minded fans of any band or artist I've ever seen!

"WAH! This album isn't like those earlier albums! I want them to play the kind of music they were playing in 1984 until the end of time!".



I think it's because some of the band's fans are just trying to recapture their youth. It's like they're Peter Pan and those first three albums are Never-Never Land.


The band has grown and evolved but apparently some of their fans' tastes haven't.

 

This has to be the most tone deaf post you have made on the subject.

 

I call 'em as I see 'em.

 

Wherever I May Roam is a killer track!

 

For me it seemed like a natural progression at the time. Masters seemed to be the result of Kill and Ride while AJFA came off a bit bloated (to me anyway). I saw the Black Album as synthesising those first three records into more concise tunes. I liked it the first time I heard but I did fall off the ride with Load and haven't heard the last few releases at all. Still the first three and the self-titled get spins from time to time (along with Garage Days). I have yet to warm up to AJFA and expect I never will.

 

It's more than that. I, myself, was never a big "thrash" fan and, to be honest, never really liked Metallica a ton. I liked Kill Em' All for its rawness and heaviness, and Ride the Lightning because it had good songs, but it wasn't the speed of the songs that I liked, it was the heaviness. In fact, I never warmed to Master of Puppets (outside of "The Thing That Should Not Be") because the songs didn't speak to me. Much of ...And Justice for All didn't either. But, with Metallica I least respected them due to the product they were putting out. It was heavy. Metallica, to me, wasn't (though I did, and still do, like "Sad But True"). So, it's not matter of the album not having any "thrash" as I don't particularly care for that genre that much, but the fact that the sound changed and I didn't like the material on Metallica. It's not just a simple dismissal because the album wasn't "thrash".

 

So you don't like Metallica's thrash albums, and you don't like their non-thrash albums.

Remind me why you're buying Metallica albums, again? (Just kidding).

 

I was young back then, bought it when released. Loved the fact that I could finally watch them on MTV outside of Headbanger's Ball. I was growing out of my metal phase though, and subsequently went in a more punk direction in my tastes, so this was my last Metallica purchase. It was definitely different than anything they had previously done, but that never bothered me. I will say that due to the plodding nature of some of the songs, it wouldn't be the first Metallica disc I would put on today. However, an earlier post mentioned some of the overall theme of the songs, which I'd like to revisit and get a handle on. Metallica was always a "big picture" band with their songs' meanings, which is part of their prog heritage. I remember JH talking about how they were listening to a lot of Bob Seger and the like during production and I definitely get that kind of vibe from this album.

 

Metallica is the Yoko Ono of metal. They aren't afraid to do new or experimental stuff (S+M, Load/Reload, St. Anger) even if it doesn't always turn out good. I can respect that.

 

Well, you should buy glasses in that case. It isn't like people expected them to stay exactly the same. But Metallica did more than change their sound. They basically went and changed genres, from being a Progressive Thrash Metal to an Alt Metal band, so don't blame people who liked the progressive elements in the music for not liking stuff that they never signed up for. The songs were just not as good.

 

None can deny the fact that Black represents a conscious move from Metallica to reach the super mainstream rock audience who bought truckloads of Motley and Aerosmith . Same can be said about Load which was a clear attempt at connecting with the alternative/ grunge audience (the album is so infuse with Alice In Chains, it's almost ridiculous). A pattern which will be repeated again with Anger which was clearly targeted at the Nu Metal younger audience. This is to say that Metallica is a band whose artistic integrity is very questionable.
Black isn't a bad album but there is a vacuity in it that cannot be denied. Most of the songs played live are killers while the studio versions are nowhere near as good thanks to Rock's bombastic and sterile production.

 

They definitely paid their dues. I also think some forget the transition going on within the band and how that related to subsequent releases.

AJFA was the first without Cliff, and apparently the mix is a result of that reaction. The Black Album was their first with all of that behind them, with JN accepted (more or less), a new producer and a new way to explore ideas.

 

Yeah, because they wanted to keep selling albums and selling tickets to newer and younger fans. They didn't want to become a stale, tired "80's hits" act and who can blame them for that?

 

I'm not a big Metallica fan, but from what I remember, most Metallica fans I knew at the time (including my best friend) used to LOVE it.

 

Remind me again what "80's hits" Metallica has?

 

Okay, I meant "80's fan favorites". They didn't actually have commercial hits until 1989 which is kind of my point. They had to grow to survive as a money-making entity.

If they hadn't, they'd be another niche has-been band now making a living playing bars.

 

Despite what my earlier comments might indicate, I think the album's OK. As seems to be the eternal case with Metallica after the first couple of albums, it's overlong - ditching two or three lesser songs and trimming the timing of some others would've made for a much stronger album in the 50 minute range - but it was nice to actually have some BASS in there, and good that they'd dialed down the lengthy overcomplexity that made "And Justice For All" (the song) a bit of an endurance test for both band and many a listener. I'd been following the band since Ride The Lightening in '84, so like many others I was a bit jarred at first by the emphasis on midtempo heavy grooves rather than thrash riffs, and by the accessibility of "Enter Sandman" in particular. But it wasn't hard to adjust to, and it's not like midtempo heavy rock was totally unprecedented in the Metallica catalogue - if we look back to Lightning, we find "Escape", which clocks in at a reasonable four minutes and which I thought at the time was accessible enough to maybe get some FM radio play.

 

If they kept making thrash albums through the '90s, it would have gotten old really quickly. Becoming more mainstream bought them a bit more shelf-life. And it made them a boatload of money. Yeah, it was a sell-out, but what do people expect?

Love 'em or hate 'em, they clearly worked hard to get where they were at that point, and they deserved a bit of a pay day. To expect them to continue to pander to a small but dedicated group of fans for their whole career is a bit short sighted. That sort of thing is great for a young band who is interested in their "craft", but at this point they were getting older, and presumably getting married and having kids. Ride The Lightning doesn't pay the mortgage. They made an accessible record, and good for them. I can't imagine that band writing the same fast, angst-filled music through their 30s, 40s and beyond.