This came out in 2003 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
“Metallica is dead to me.”
I saw that posted on the Web a while back. Sure, it’s just one guy’s opinion. But anybody who’s been following the Metallica saga knows he’s not alone. Hell, for the last few years, even the members of the veteran thrash-metal band have seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. Singer-guitarist James Hetfield went into rehab for alcoholism; bassist Jason Newsted left under a cloud; and drummer Lars Ulrich’s vociferous crusade against Napster turned into a PR debacle that made them look like spoiled, greedy whiners. No wonder many fans wrote them off.
But if there’s one thing Metallica know how to do, it’s bounce back from adversity. They did it when bassist Cliff Burton died in a bus crash in 1986. They did it when grunge nearly killed metal in the ’90s. And they’re out to do it again with St. Anger, the long-overdue studio followup to 1996 and 1997’s bloated and disappointing Load and Reload. St. Anger may be the most anticipated disc of the summer — originally due in mid-June, it was rush-released following rumours of Internet leaks. But it’s also the most important album of Metallica’s career — a do-or-die effort that will either vault them back to the top or confirm that their glory days are officially over.
I don’t know how it’ll turn out, but I can tell you this: Metallica aren’t giving up without a fight. And St. Anger is their battle plan — a 75-minute assault of relentless aggression and streamlined power that add up to one of the band’s most distinctive and revealing discs. The buzz is that St. Anger hearkens back to the complex, epic majesty of triumphs like Master of Puppets. But based on my admittedly limited advance exposure to the disc — a couple of spins in the presence of a Warner employee earlier this week — that seems an oversimplification. St. Anger is no Master of Puppets. But it’s no Reload either. Instead, it’s somewhere in the middle — a disc that intelligently mines the strongest elements of Metallica’s past and reconfigures them into a sleeker, stronger, more efficient killing machine.
Some pieces are old: The chugging, swaggering guitar riffs harvested from the low end of the neck; the galloping double-bass drumbeats whipped along by a clanging machine-gun snare; the nuclear-powered bass explosions (capably delivered by producer Bob Rock); the synchronized accents, whiplash pacing, dynamic tension and stop-start arrangements; the disarmingly gentle interludes; and the epic-length tracks (none of these cuts is less than five minutes, and three are longer than eight). Other elements are notably absent. Like guitar solos — amazingly and strikingly, you won’t find a single lead anywhere on St. Anger. Nor will you encounter the sort of insane syncopation, hyperspeed thrash and finger-tangling progressions the boys used to reel off endlessly. Here, they’ve put the complexity into the arrangements — instead of 10 parts with a million notes each, these repetitive, solidly mid-tempo tracks have a million parts with 10 notes each. Finally, there are a couple of important new elements in the mix: Razor-sharp melodic hooks and personal lyrics that frankly tackle Hetfield’s demons, addictions and struggles with rehab (“I drink from the cup of denial;” “Who’s in charge of my head today?” and the pointed, “My lifestyle determines my death style”).
Of course, the secret is putting the pieces together right — and Metallica do it more often than not on St. Anger. Sure, one might argue there are a few too many quiet interludes on these cuts, or that Rock’s unchanging wall-of-thunder production leaves too many of these tracks sounding virtually identical, or that a few guitar solos might have added some individuality and high end to these bottom-heavy, interchangable riff-fests. But when Metallica link the pieces together right — on the punishing opener Frantic, the propulsive title cut, the sludgy Some Kind Of Monster, the bludgeoning groove Invisible Kid and the menacing All Within My Hands, to cite a few examples — they come close to building the perfect metal beast. Along with being heavy and uncompromising, these songs are also surprisingly and irrefutably catchy, full of memorable choruses and singalong refrains. By the time you catch yourself, you realize you’ve been singing, “Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill!” along with Hetfield. Or chanting, “Shoot me again, I ain’t dead yet!”
And hell, any band that can draw you in that effectively — not to mention pull off such a stunning, smartly calculated creative rebirth after 20 years — is definitely a long way from dead. Whether some fans are willing to accept it or not.
