Metalcatto
I’m starting a new section, one where we forget about greatness and jump straight into the horror. Not everything is awesome in our Metalsphere, and it’s time for me to warn future generations about albums like Metallica‘s St. Anger, the bad album par excellence. Not many albums are this iconic and this atrocious. So where the hell do I even start?
The real tragedy of St. Anger is that the album is full of unique things, but all done catastrophically wrong. The drums are memorable, for example, but sound like someone smacking a trash bin. As if the guys collectively decided there wasn’t enough cowbell in Metal and proceeded to bomb us with every rural sound they could find. And the guitar tune somehow makes Papa Roach sound tough.
This thing has more simplified riffs than a Slipknot album. Forget about guitar solos; apparently, those weren’t trendy 20 years ago. I assume there’s a bass player somewhere in there, and although he didn’t get the …And Justice for All treatment, the dude definitely feels like he was included to avoid another PR nightmare for the band. How about the vocals? By this point, Hetfield had tried pretty much everything with his vocal range, but whatever he’s going for on St. Anger remains obtuse to me. He sounds like he’s in pain, which honestly makes sense.
Yet I think Metallica could have endured all these individual mistakes, but what really drives me mad about St. Anger is how uninspired the songwriting is. Gone are the days of Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets, when Metallica showed it could go to hell and back in eight minutes. Here, you’re going to get smacked with that awfully forgettable “St. Anger” chorus over and over again. Or that tick-tock chorus in “Frantic” that we were apparently supposed to sing along with. Who thought that would fly? If the album were half as long, it could at least pass as an EP.
In a way, Metallica would spend the rest of this century acting like St. Anger never happened. Would you blame them? This is like being a teenager, farting wet on prom night right when the music goes off, and then having to live with the consequences for the rest of your life. There’s really no way to recover after that. However, there’s something terribly memorable about this thing, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. It’s the The Room (2004) of Metal albums: something awful that you can’t stop watching. A total train wreck. Thank you for the laughs, Metallica, but even with all its mistakes, nothing could prepare us for the horrors Lulu would show us years later.
Since serving consecutive life sentences wasn’t hard enough.
