Hesher

I didn't say they didn't make great music, and I hate "virtuosos" like Steve Vai or what have you. Skill doesn't make a band. I already said that Metallica's songwriting and lyrics were their greatest strength and made them deservingly popular. You continue to put words in my mouth and then attack me for being a hypocrite. Metalheads appreciate skill and technical talent is something that is usually looked for in a band. That is part of the genre. The problem with Metallica was that their later material lacked the complexity (or depth) and creativity of their older material when they had already set the bar high for themselves.

Metal sounds good. It is usually well produced in order to bring out and showcase the complexity, creativity, depth, technical skill, lyrics and songwriting abilities of the band. St. Anger took millions of dollars of top-of-the-line equipment and made it all sound totally awful in an attempt to emulate a classic old-school essence that was the result of limited resources and rushed recording, and then combined it with ridiculous lyrics ("I'M MADLY IN ANGER WITH YOU!") and poor overall songwriting. If you translated those things into any other genre, the resulting album would be a poor representative of the genre and the band that created it. Do you agree? That was my point. I did not say that I didn't want metal to expand or that I wanted it to conform to a specific style OR that breaking away from it is heresy. You wrote your own copy to satisfy your image of the stupid metalhead. There are lots of bands that I would consider metal that sound absolutely nothing like Metallica, Slayer, Death, Obituary, blah blah or anything created in before 2009 and I like some of them too.

Obviously nobody is going to dissuade you from your self-perpetuated illusions.

How ironic, seeing as how that's exactly what you are doing.

No, it's a terrible album because it's a terrible album. I already listed the reasons twice. I am not the only person who thinks so, and we are not some kind of tiny cabal. I think it's important for bands to change their sound or at least quit and start a new band if they want to explore other sounds. To again use QOTSA as an example, I hate Era Vulgaris, but it is still a well-written and produced album in my and many others opinions, and if they had only made clones of Songs for the Deaf like many lunkheaded fans wanted, they would have stagnated and sounded awful. Ok? For the record, I fucking hate Megadeth.

I like the Black Album. You can't even get your facts straight.

Is that what I said? No, it's not. As I've said several times now, they were already popular, and producing the albums they did after the Black Album wasn't "selling out". It was making bad albums. I dare you to find me a quorum of Metallica fans who think Load and Reload are their favourites or even merely up to the creative and quality standard of the earlier material. Once more I repeat that there is a difference between exploring new sounds and writing good music. They are not mutually exclusive but neither are they both automatically true.

You continue to display your lack of experience and respect for the genre. This makes your argument look pretty ridiculous.

Again, I never said that. That is a stereotype that you are perpetuating to match the image of me and other metalheads in your own mind. I don't like endless wanking either and I don't think it, of all things, implies creativity. Metallica never did endless wanking at fast tempos and they didn't need to. The whole concept of endless wanking is something metal bands never do, and if they do, they are attacked for it by metalheads because it's boring to listen to and creatively dead.

If you threw out your preconceived notions of what I'm supposed to say and how I'm supposed to think and actually gave me the benefit of the doubt and READ what I ACTUALLY WROTE I think we might actually agree on some things.