St. Anger Revisited

I’ve been putting this off for a while as this album changed things for me. This is the only album I have ever taken back to the store. Metallica’s St. Anger was the album that single put me off metal for years. Why am I revisiting such an album that divided fans? Fifteen years has passed since hearing the album, let’s see if I can find a new perspective.

The song Frantic plays as I write this and it’s not good. The sound has aged terribly after only fifteen years. Bob Rock really let the sound quality dip as his sonically superior albums like Dr Feelgood and Keep the Faith still hold up. I like your work Bob, but you really dropped the ball on this. I know you wanted to make Metallica sound like a band with renewed fire and panache, but it sounds like Nu-Metal light.

The title track St. Anger is so muddy and distorted; there is no clarity. It sounds like four track demo done in a stone wall garage, if that is what they were going for congratulations.

Some Kind of Monster has promise but it’s uncooked. The stripped production kills the song. Even Kirk Hammett who I know can rip on guitar, is reduced to an unsatisfying octave pedal lead in the intro.

The other songs up until Sweet Amber and The Unnamed feeling do not grab me at all; it’s just a wall of raw noise. Sweet Amber is one of the few songs that have a hint of promise but the production again kills it dead. The album so far is as unbearable to listen to as it was in 2003. The Unnamed Feeling is the one song that would have benefited from a good polish; it is a shame it wasn’t around during the Load sessions, it would have sounded a miles better in my eyes.

When it was released all the music magazines, guitar magazines were raving about it. I was like are we hearing the same record? I was the only one who thought the record sucked. Every metal fan I knew liked it, they said I didn’t understand it and I wasn’t metal enough to judge it. I was a small minority then, now however, I feel time has told on the album. I’m not alone in my frustration with it.

To revisit it even further I viewed Some Kind of Monster, the documentary filmed around the time of Metallica’s internal strife. It opened my eyes. The world’s biggest metal band needs “group therapy”; I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. They were petty arguments over nothing at all, for example, one person wasn’t around when two other people were listening to a mix of a song so the other person had a hissy fit. Is this what happens when you make it that big and prominent? That you become nothing but childish, conceited, immature twats. On top of that the “Performance Enhancing “coach; I know, it sounds like an ad for a sexual dysfunction therapist. He starts trying to milk the band for all the money he can like a shyster; he sounds like a Hollywood agent. The documentary did help me see the pressure they were under behind the scenes. It still doesn’t excuse St. Anger as an album. To me it seems they were just hopping on the Nu-Metal cash train at the time with the vast change in sound and approach. St. Anger is still the album that caused me to throw in the towel with the band and metal music. The band has forgotten what got them to the top in the first place. Guttural fire, I don’t hear that in Metallica now. Complacency kills all art.

Stuart Ritchie