1:
2:
3:
4: Metallica
5: Death Magnetic
6: Kill Em All
7: Hardwired...To Self Destruct
8: Reload
9: Load
10: 72 Seasons
11: St. Anger
Total score: 152
Highest score: 11 (
@Shmoolikipod @____no5)
Lowest score: 5 (
@eddie666 @Mosh)
On a more hard rock/pop oriented forum, this album would likely be #1. On a pure metal forum, it would likely be #10 or #11 even. On Maidenfans, The Black Album lands at a pretty reasonable place given the general sentiment around this album and its legacy. I don't think there was any real opportunity to best the remaining three albums on here, and it was in fact not very close: there's a
30 point gap between The Black Album and the #3 album on the list. Funnily enough, there's also an exactly 30 point gap between Death Magnetic and Black, which puts Black kind of in its own tier. These two gaps also happen to be the biggest point differences between albums anywhere in the game.
I expected ratings for this album to a little bit more all over the place, but it pretty much entirely averaged out in the top 5 (most ratings fell somewhere between #6 and #3). The Maidenfans consensus seems to be that Black is a very good album, but not quite at the top tier. Even the lowest rankings put it well above the bottom. Is that to say that the album lacks serious detractors here, or that Metallica has enough material with serious quality issues that a well produced and well performed collection of weaker songs still places high?
Personally, I mostly land on indifference toward this album. It's certainly a cut above some of the dregs to come, but I'm not sure if that's really saying much. Basically, my bottom 4 matches the Maidenfans bottom 4, but I rank both Hardwired and Death Magnetic in addition to the debut album above Black. It's not that I think Metallica sold out, the album still has riffs and a heavy edge to it, but I miss the more high energy moments. A lot of those mid tempo rockers just sound kinda tired to me. And while yes this album has some pretty massive hits, I've always felt that the album has quite a bit of filler especially on the back half and is one of the classic examples of an album falling victim to overloading a CD while compromising the album flow. At a certain point it just feels like a random slab of unrelated songs without any real coherency. Some songs also just feel too similar to justify including both on the album. I frequently get Nothing Else Matters and The Unforgiven mixed up, for example. Similarly, songs like My Friend of Misery, Wherever I May Roam, Of Wolf and Man all kind of have a similar tone for me.
Obviously for a lot of Metal fans Black lives in the shadow of the classic albums that came before, but I don't even really compare it to those as much as I compare it to other rock albums from the early 90s. Nevermind, Ten, Dirt... and I just don't think Black even really compares. I know that's a pretty biased take as I obviously gave this album a lower score than most other lists, so I will be curious to hear from those who had it higher!