As for melody? The golden three were their best era for melody almost unquestionably. Each album starts off with better-written melodic sections than anything you'll find on the Loads and that's just the start.
LOL no way. The thrash era albums are great, with the riffs, and the melodic guitar sections by Hetfield, but 90% of it is just Hetfield grunting the same note over a thrashed E. The vocal sections have very little variation.
On Reload and Load especially, he actually SINGS, and there are a lot of good harmonies, and melodic riffs, instead of just thrashing E as fast as possible. The Black albums also leaves the first 4 albums for dead in that regard.
I'm not saying that makes Load/Reload better, because I still think they're overall weakly written albums, but there's no way they're not more melodic then the repetitive formula of the first 4 albums.
So an abundance of half-hearted, rednecky vocal melodies/harmonies over Eb m pentatonic fills makes something more melodic than what I cited above? Also, it's amusing how you completely ignored my laundry list of why the golden three win. Bottom line? Quantity is not automatically better than quantity.
We get it, you hate Load/Reload! I didn't ignore you list, but making a list doesn't prove they're more melodic. It just proves they have melody. I could easily do the same for Load, but all I'd get is a response like this anyway, where you'd ignore
my laundry list. We'd just go around in circles. Ain't nobody got time fo dat!
As I said, I don't think Load/Reload are strong albums overall, but that doesn't mean they're complete write offs in every regard. I'd probably even take my least favourite of the first 4 albums over Reload. But by the very definition thrash, melody is often the exception, not the rule. The fact Metallica managed to include as much melody as they did on those albums is probably what set them apart from the other thrash bands. And when they did it, it was excellent.
But the songs still largely follow the same formula of "sing E over an E riff for verse, sing F# over an F# riff for the prechorus, back to E for the chorus". Hetfield has a total range of maybe 4 notes across those albums. As great as the songs were, it was overall very primitive compared to TBA and Load/Reload.
I'm not talking about quality here, or quantity. I'm just talking about melody.