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Metallica: St. Anger
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July 18, 2003 - Zeb "Reload" Snyder (Columnist)
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Hurry! Look at this picture now before we get sued for acknowledging the existance of Metallica. |
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The title of Metallica’s newest studio album hints to a better description of the album’s content than anything I could come up with myself: it is angry. No doubt about it, both in lyrics and in music, this is an angry album. So if angry isn’t your thing, you might as well pass this one by. If you’re still reading, I guess that means you’re willing to indulge someone else’s raging outbursts, and that they possibly help you deal with your own anger. Or maybe you just like hearing James Hetfield scream, I don’t know.
First, the lyrics. Hetfield’s lyrics on this album are some of his most forceful to date, albeit different from his standard fare. The metaphorically driven lyrics of his past several albums have been replaced by more direct lyrics that leave little confusion as to the meaning. He tells you what he’s pissed off about, and just how pissed off it makes him. He tells you about his pain. That being said, the lyrics are not so specific that only a rehabber like Hetfield can relate to them. That being said, as always with Metallica, there are a couple of songs where it sounds like Hetfield scrawled the lyrics on a Wendy’s napkin while driving home from a late night Dave’s Deluxe binge. But on the whole, the lyrics are solid albeit a bit of a departure from the last few albums.
Screw all of that, ‘cause you don’t care about the words and I don’t really know where I was going with it anyway. You love “Enter Sandman” and Hetfield probably came up with those lyrics five minutes before he sang them, so I won’t waste my breath telling you what a great lyricist Hetfield is, as exemplified on tracks like “Bleeding Me”, “Fixxxer”, “Disposable Heroes”, “One”, etc. It isn’t worth my time. You want to know how the album sounds.
Well, it sounds really weird, to be honest.
You know that garage rock thing that was popular about a year, year-and-a-half ago? All the ‘the’ bands like The Hives, The Strokes, and The Vines? How they were kinda going for that rough, garage-rock sound? Well, they got there via over-production. Metallica basically achieved an authentic garage-rock vibe closer to the old fashioned way. Producer Bob Rock set up a few old, beat-up mikes in front of the amps, and a few near the drums, and said “ok, let’s play.” They jammed out on riffs, and got it all down. As a result, the CD sounds exactly the way it sounded in the room when these guys were playing. That’s good and bad. Lars’ drums sound the strangest of all. His snare no longer pops; in fact, it now sounds more like a dull thud. Sometimes the double bass drumming is overpowering – apparently there was no dampening used on the bass drums, as is common. The drums on the first two track sound so strange, it is nearly distracting.
The guitars, however, sound sublime – unless you don’t like heavy metal, in which case they sound like Excedrin headache numbers three, four, and seven. Pretty sweet. These riffs are really tasty. Some sound closer to their older riffs, some are more reminiscent of Black Album-era riffs, and there’s one or two that probably could have worked on Load somewhere.
Nice, eh? Sort of. The problem is that they took these riffs, which were individually written and developed from what I understand, and then jammed ‘em together using ProTools until they found combinations that worked. So while they achieved a very rough, organic, garage-type sound with the recording of each individual riff, the riffs have been digitally spliced together in a very—here’s that word again—rough fashion, which is rather noticeable and jarring at times. This causes some of the riffs to seem as if they don’t really gel very well which makes a few songs stand out in a bad way. I won’t say which ones—that’s for you to discover.
There are no guitar solos here which has drawn a lot of attention. I mean, if you think early Metallica you probably think of some blistering Kirk Hammet fretboard runs that leave your jaw on the floor. And if you think about more recent Metallica, you probably think of some of the bluesy slide work that gave Metallica a soulful, smooth feeling that it had never had previously. All of that is absent here, but the trick is that you don’t really notice it. These songs are already so full, so busy, that I can’t really imagine solos fitting into them anywhere. Apparently that’s what the band decided as well. Still, it is somewhat mind-blowing to think about a Metallica album without guitar solos. It just sounds unholy.
Interestingly enough, the band included a special DVD of them rehearsing the album with new bassist Robert Trujillo (Rock played bass on the recordings) with the album packaging, and this rehearsal sounds far better than the album. I chalk it up to the fact that the tunes are being played live in their entirety without any awkward edits, and that the room seemed to be miked in a more traditional sense—in other words, the drums sounded normal. Given that, I have to say that I find little fault with the arrangements themselves, but rather with the recording and production techniques used.
So, what’s the final verdict? It’s a technically solid album with very good playing that also manages to show some miscues, vocal flaws, and the like, but this is all watered down by the production. It’s really that distracting at times, and it certainly diminished my enjoyment of the album. I have a feeling these songs will rock live (look for my review of the Washington, DC Summer Sanitarium Tour) but on the album they just feel a bit disjointed.
Will you like it? Well, if you’re a fan of old Metallica and Load and Reload left a bad taste in your mouth, you’ll probably welcome the return to a faster, more brutal style of metal. That being said, you won’t be completely satisfied since this album isn’t nearly the masterpiece that Master of Puppets or . . . And Justice for All were. On the other hand, if you’re a fan of the more radio-friendly albums like Load, Reload, and the Black Album to the exclusion of their prior work you probably will not find much that suits your palate here. So in other words, purchase at your own risk.
6/10
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