I agree, I liked the versatility that they possessed in the 90's. I loved the chunkyness of "Devil's Dance"... that slow chugging riff still sticks with me. Then songs like Memory Remains, Fuel, Unforgiven II, Low Man's Lyric, Hero of the Day, House That Jack Built, Better Than You, Where the Wild Things Are, Ain't my Bitch, 2x4... on and on... Those two albums had some of the better ROCK music of the mid 90's. To put out a killer rock album with a throw back metal vibe and new era rock feel in the time when grunge music ruled is pretty ballsy... They tried the same thing with St. Anger but I think it was just poorly executed...
People complain about the lack of solos... Load/Reload were both albums with minimum guitar solos, that didn't make them bad albums. Truthfully, a lot of Hammetts stuff on ...And Justice For All and Ride The Lightning comes out of nowhere and some of it sounds forced. I like fluidity in songs. Load/Reload had that... where solos were placed in the right places and left out of the places that they shouldn't have been. St. Anger was a yet a different direction and I commend them for going out on that limb that so few artists dare to go out on. It takes a big name like Metallica to put out an album that's trying to be as inventive as their attempt at St. Anger... Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynrd, Sabbath, Maiden.... they all do what they do well and I haven't seen any of them try to do anything THAT different in the last 25 years besides what sells their albums and what has been the natural evolution of music. Metallica tried to grab musical evolution by the balls and say "Hey, you're gonna go over here"... Obviously, musical evolution is a girl and has no balls... because she didn't follow. Metallica whiffed.
St. Anger wasn't a good album... but it was Metallica trying to step in a direction to reinvent metal... and you can't fault them for the attempt.
Load/Reload were both great rock albums. It'll be interesting to see which of the 3 heads of Metallica shows up on the next album... Will it be Alcoholica (80's), Rockaholica (90's), or What-the-hell-was-that-aholica (2000's)...