DM is fine if you listen to the Guitar Hero III mixes. The official releases are all smurfing awful.

My conclusion with Load/Reload is that it would have made a good single disc or double LP. It might even have made a good double CD/triple LP at about two hours. The 160-minute combination, though, just had so much material that it all started to run together. Several of the songs didn't really do much to distinguish themselves from one another, and that's never a good sign.

That said, there were good songs like several of the ones you mentioned (I don't see much special about "Devil's Dance" but I would've mentioned the others as highlights); I'd also throw "Where the Wild Things Are" on that list. It's not a surprise that the longest songs on those albums tended to be the best, because those were the ones where the band really gave themselves the freedom to stretch out and deviate from the formula.

I'd say the Black Album was much the same way, even though it had a lot less material - while you could probably accuse the band of using a formula from Ride the Lightning through And Justice for All, at least on those albums they used enough variation in their songwriting to distinguish the songs from one another. I mean, obviously you can say that the fourth track on all those albums (and DM for that matter) is a ballad, and that the penultimate or ultimate track is always an instrumental, and so on, but the fact is none of those songs sounds the same. With the Black Album, though, that was the point from which a lot of their songs didn't do much to distinguish themselves. The songs that broke from the formula - "My Friend of Misery", "The God That Failed", "The Unforgiven", "Nothing Else Matters", etc. - tended to be the most interesting, although there were a few that managed to be interesting despite obviously being composed to a formula ("Sad but True", "Enter Sandman").

St. Anger, though, was a steaming pile of tit. Seriously I don't know what they were thinking.

Lulu I'll give them somewhat of a pass as they weren't the ones who wrote it. They were basically just Lou Reed's backing band. I don't entirely know what he was thinking though.