I’ve been a hardcore Metallica fan for a few years now and I find this album intensely disappointing. It sounds nothing like the Metallica I grew to know and love. It’s sick thrash metal, none of the trademark lyrics that have depth, no guitar solos, no talented drumming.
It sounds like Lars traded in his drumset for a couple of aluminum garbage cans.
I’ve found that many other people dislike this album greatly, as there isn’t any one signifigant song that rectifies the album.
What’s happened to them, and what do you think of the new album?
I haven’t liked Metallica for the longest time, and only moderately so when I actually did.
The new song (I can’t judge the album; I didn’t hear it) is a joke. It sounds like my engineering skills (read: BAD) over a garage thrash song played by second-year musicians.
Heh – I saw a funny Photo-Shop the other day illustrating this fact.
Lars’ snare drum has to be the most expensive piece of crap I’ve ever heard. AFAIK, it’s his high-end bell brass signature model that, IIRC, is about US$2,000 retail. Evidently he had the snares off during the recording and liked the sound (!), so he kept it, mis-tensioned heads and all. To me, it sounds exactly like a piece of aluminum siding processed through a worn-out spring reverb. It’s a sad waste, really; such a drum can sound like its price when tensioned properly.
James just seems like he’s running through the lyric sheet after a long day of running. I didn’t bother listening to the lyrics; if the video is any indication, I’m glad I didn’t.
The new bass guitarist frightens me.
What’s happened to them? IMHO, they’ve ran out of gas.
I’ve only heard the title track and one other on the radio, and I gotta say, it’s one of the most incomprehensibly awful releases I’ve ever heard. The material per se is not bad, but what the hell compelled them to make the album sound like it was recorded at the bottom of a dumpster? The drums are TOO GODDAMN LOUD!
See people, this is the downside of file sharing. Thanks to Napster, Metallica can’t afford good lyrics or properly tuned instruments anymore. O, how the mighty have fallen!
lame. As many mentioned in another thread, why did Kirk even show up? There isn’t one solo on the album, or an instance where two guitars are better than one.
Some artists branch out and really push the envelope. And I have to give it to them that at least they’re doing something different. But it’s not new, and it’s not very good. Frankly, I would’ve preferred more of the same. More of the same stuff pre-black album to be exact.
Someone played it at a party I was at, and almost everyone (except the owner of the CD) hated it. The drums sound like garbage cans, and they wrote a song about a necklace.
They seem to have run out of ideas, and decided to invent a saint, and write an bad music about it. If St. Anger really existed, I would not be happy with this album/song named after me. I’ve never really been a “fan” of Metallica, but I have liked some of the songs I’ve heard. This was just bad music, regardless of who is singing it.
Sometime during the party, one of the people there decided it would be fun to throw stuff on the fire, and sing “Saint Anger” each time he threw something on the fire. That was the best thing the album produced.
Someone offered to pay the owner of the cd $20 to throw it on the fire.
Yeah, I knew that everyone else had my impression of the single when it sank off the playlists of the bluecollar-metal-headbanging stations in the town I travel to for work. I heard it again the other day, and realized I hadn’t heard it in over a week.
Just horrible. I was shocked at it when I first heard it. I’ll have to go on (cough) service to sample the rest.
And what’s with this “no solos” bit? I just heard “Some Kind of Monster”, and there’s a solo on it. I’ve heard this so many times now about this album, including in printed interview with Kirk, and right there is a solo.
I think Metallica forgot that a good song is a good song at pretty much any speed. I don’t want to sing along with any of these. I can’t imagine them getting stuck in my head. The idea of real vocal melody seems to be almost completely abandoned. It’s pretty bad when I can imagine myself having written an album, or have a flash of what most rock must sound like to my parents. There’s a beat, and some semblence of playing in a certain key, but no real attempt at lasting music, it seems to me.
It has absolutely no redeeming features. And I looked! I was prepared to like it! I mean, good on them for trying something different - but did the whole album have to be the same featureless, droning mess? You can hardly hear James at all, and as someone has said previously, there was no point Kirk showing up at all.
Where are the stunning solos? The variety? The melody? Bah.
…And when it started to rain, the CD was almost inadvertantly left outside. (It had quickly been swapped for the Ramones, though it would continue to be mocked for the rest of the night). As everyone hurried into the house, the host remembered good ol’ St. Anger at the last second.
Someone, real sarcastic, says, “Oooh, that could have been a disaster. You wouldn’t want St. Anger to get scratched, or moistened, or left out here defenseless at the mercy of the elements…”
Which got a big laugh.
The host got an even bigger laugh when he took the list a step further and added, “…scratched, subjected to the elements…or, you know…played.”
I’m sorry to have to say it (I really wanted Metallica to have a good new album), but my sentiments exactly.
You aren’t supposed to judge a book by its cover, but you can usually judge an album by its cover. “St. Anger”? Why not just come right out and call the album “Please, we really are angry and tortured heavy metal rockers and we’re just as mean and violent as the nasty faces we put on in our publicity photos. We really aren’t spoiled, rich metal divas with 45-foot trailers and manicurists who want every penny we can squeeze out of our fans, honestly, please give us $20 for this CD. We really feel your teenaged pain whilst counting our money in our 8500-square-foot-mansions.”
Not that a band called “Metallica” can be accused of subtlety, but really, the guys are about four years behind on the “Angsty Musician” image thing here. There’s an image component to selling your music, and the guys are just too old and transparently greedy to pull it off anymore. You have to at least bea ble to fool people into thinking you really are the mean rebel your publicity stills make you out to be. I don’t think Metallica’s fooling anyone.
minty green, I would amend that to say, the first TWO MINUTES of “Frantic” are pretty good, but then it dissolves into the crapola that continues nonstop until the album’s end.
Which explains why they cut off that song on “MTvIcon”. To leave everyone with the impression that the rest of that song (and the album) really DID sound that cool. A total marketing ploy.
Oh, and Robert Trujillo (the new bassist) did NOT play on the album, it was Bob Rock on bass. Maybe Hetfield, too. Trujillo joined the band only weeks before the album’s release.
Fuck Metallica. Fuck 'em in the ear. (Of course, my opinion of them has been in the Ninth Circle of Hell since the whole Napster fiasco, so this latest development hardly changes my opinion of the band at all.)
Wow, this is like a bad flashback. It seems that every Metallica CD released since “Master of Puppets” gets the same review which is “It sucks because it’s not like the last album(s)”.
[Comic book guy]Worst album ever[/Comic book guy]
I actually like this CD. The snare sound could be better but otherwise it’s pretty good.
Slee (who saw Metallica on the Metal Up your Ass tour way back when)
Interesting, you are the first real person who has said that. (Umm…you don’t work for Elektra/WEA, do you? Seriously.)
I stopped buying 'Tallica after “Load” (although Garage Inc. was ok) and nowadays I only download their music out of spite and rage, after the Napster bullsh*t. Funny, I got a whole CD full of “fake” songs while I d/l’ed St. Anger. And the fakes were WAY BETTER than the real thing!!! ;j
