One of the best metal bands there has ever been. Definately the best American metal band ever. The Black album wasn't sellout and it definately wasn't lazy, they worked hard on that and got a huge sound happening. It's success was based on being the culmination of 10 years hard graft. They had been building momentum all that time. Justice had sold something like two million copies so by the time Black was released metal was being accepted in the mainstream. Black just hit at the right time and took Metallica over the top. After that they just wanted to take it in a different direction and it didn't really work. Load and Reload are fucking great American heavy rock albums though, there's some killer stuff on both of those. The Symphony thing is a bunch of pretentious shit but it's not a sellout, it's actually a risk, again to do something different. St. Anger is an abortion. Probably the worst album by a major act ever. Just crap, and if you watch the Some Kind Of Monster dvd you can see why. Egos and money and fuckwits like Bob Rock and that shrink thinking they were actually in the band was hideous. The whole album was a trainwreck and an embarrassment. Death Magnetic I think is pretty shit as well. They are trying to get their oold heavy sound back but at the same time they are trying to "out heavy" bands like Machine Head and it's not gonna happen. What they need to do is go back to listening to the old British metal albums of the 80s like Maiden and Diamond Head and Venom and Motorhead that they used to listen to and just speed that stuff up. That's what they did best and that's what the sound they are trying to recapture was.
