f

Metallica, the one band every man, woman and child on the planet know as the ambassador of metal. They didn’t get to that status by coincidence though or pure luck. Metallica released some of the world’s most critically acclaimed metal albums in the 1980’s and have to date sold over 53 million albums in the United States alone. There is no argument that Metallica are immensely successful, but does that merit a complete slack off in their career? Apparently so.

In this weeks Sunday Roast we look at 2003’s release ‘St. Anger’. An album meeting mixed reviews from professionals, but meeting worldwide panning  from almost every metal community.

6 years after the predecessor release,  1997’s ‘Reload’, one would think that Metallica couldn’t get any worse. One couldn’t be more wrong. Arguably the early 2000’s were a high point for bands that took on the nu-metal, alternative and post-metal genre’s with bands like System of a Down, Papa Roach and Linkin Park consistently stealing places in the charts, and with the initial release of the title track of the album ‘St. Anger’, it appears Metallica themselves decided to jump on that train. Why on earth would a band like Metallica, known as legends and appreciated in every age generation decide that writing sololess, chunky open C music was a good idea?

It is all too easy to point fingers at a record label trying to ride the band on the current trends in music, but in this case it wouldn’t make sense. Longtime producer Bob Rock had the reigns with Metallica on the production of ‘St. Anger’, and the Metallica name alone would sell records as it does with the countless sales of merchandise. This would mean that the band wrote like this themselves, and what possible influences could they have had to make such a drastic change in approach to songwriting? We can look at the events that led up to the development of the album.

Guitarist / vocalist James Hetfield checked himself into rehab for alcohol and other unknown addictions, a common trait with those in nu-metal bands (Adema’s Mark Chavez and Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix to name a couple). Looking at the back catalogue of nu-metal it is fairly arguable to say that addictions play a large role in the influence of the music, with fast, unrefined, and lyrically aggressive pieces forming each track. That is exactly what ‘St. Anger’ is, but that is not Metallica.

The mix in St. Anger is poor that it feels like every musical element was thrown into a cheap blender. Every song is so excruciatingly long  with no redeeming features you would feel as if you were having a root canal, and the drums sound like somebody took a drumstick and aggressively rolled it around in a tin can. What’s even worse is that there is a film documenting this album process named ‘Some Kind of Monster’. Hard to believe that this is the album they decided to create a feature about.

We know Metallica can do better in the current day and age, as shown with 2008’s ‘Death Magnetic’ which was met with worldwide critical acclaim once again. ‘St. Anger’ is definitely an unnecessary blemish on Metallica’s back catalogue.