Feature Articles

...And Justice for Metallica

At a Darkest Hour show last fall, the band held a copy of St. Anger in the air and proclaimed it to be the biggest possible disappointment. Then, they threw it into the crowd and ordered its destruction and the frenzied moshers were only too willing to oblige. Eagerly waiting for the band to tear into their next song, I stood silently in the middle of the audience, surrounded by anti-Metallica rhetoric and people screaming epithetical venom like "Fuck those sellouts!" I'm not sure why the thought hadn't occurred to me already, but that's when I realized that among my friends and fellow music fans in "the underground", I held yet another unpopular opinion: I actually liked St. Anger and, ironically, I had listened to the CD on the way to the show. I frequently have musical opinions that separate me from my peers and earn me a healthy amount of ribbing, but this is one I have been increasingly motivated to defend lately.

Sure, if you read the advertisements and bought into the hype, St. Anger was disappointing. It was touted as a rebirth for the band with a new bass player (who didn't actually join the band until after the recording) and a return to the their old sound. It certainly wasn't the next Master of Puppets or the return to the old school we had all been promised. But, if we take St. Anger on its own merits and ignore the pre-release media and retail frenzy, it's a really great album with some high-adrenaline music. Besides, if they had released a record that sounded like something old after releasing two albums that so many veteran fans shunned, we would not have taken them seriously and could have been certain they were only pandering to the fickle music tastes of the general public.

Often in art, appreciation can come from understanding context or ignoring it. I have removed St. Anger from the media context that surrounded its release to illustrate how it stands on its own as a solid chunk of Metal. So, read with an open mind and try to forget how upset you were when you first saw the video for St. Anger and realized it was not Master of Puppets II.

As with many good albums, there are some songs that are not that great. On St. Anger, there are two medicine balls of songwriting filth; luckily, they're consecutive tracks and you can just skip past both of them at once and continue enjoying the rest of the album. The title track starts out deceptively awesome before a radio-friendly, clean guitar verse reminds us that this is definitely post-Load Metallica. James' voice seems to vacillate between several different keys without ever falling on the one the song is in-not to mention the disgraceful recycling of lines from "Damage, Inc." The song after that, "Some Kind of Monster", is a plodding snoozer that takes a long time to develop with no real listener payoff.

Also, the lyrics are sometimes little more than laughable. In younger days, Metallica touched on societal, political, and ethical themes in addition to some songs about being a killer Metal band. Now that they're older, they offer songs that could have been written by a teenage garage band, rife with overuse of FCC-unfriendly language and themes of youthful angst about nothing important. Maybe we could forgive this as the fault of the current musical climate which encourages popular artists to keep lyrics simple and challenge little more than our ability to decide if Britney or Christina is hotter. Although I cannot use that excuse to forgive the thematic vapidness because being in such a great band should be motivation to rise above the popular standards, I can tolerate it because the strong riffs outweigh the silliness of a middle-aged man lamenting misunderstood youth in first-person.

So, there are two really bad songs and a ton of awful lyrics, but the record keeps me coming back anyway. St. Anger is really a boulder of Metal-gone-Hard Rock that can pound the wounds of Load and ReLoad out of existence. The album starts with the aggressive concrete of "Frantic". The high tempo and brilliant changes work magically with James' crescendoing psychosis of "Frantic, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tock" to set the stage for the album. Instantly, the riffs are noticeably simpler; however, Metallica have turned simplicity into a tool for aggression, as they blaze along like a speeding train always on the verge of derailing. Also, don't confuse simplified with sloppy, because the songs are tight and precisely executed. With "Invisible Kid", one of my favorite on the album, they take the detuned rumbling a little lower and show off their ability to make the listener not realize the song is over eight minutes. The intro and main riffs are driving chugga-chugga kept on course by Lars' drum attack—initially a cymbal-free pounding replaced by raucous crash cymbal abuse and some interesting rhythmic revisions. In what seems like no time at all, Metallica have run through the first five minutes of the song's interplay between dirty and clean vocals (good ones, too) over thick riffs before throwing in a little interlude that retains the song's weight while featuring more clean vocals before brilliantly segueing right back to the verse riff and leading to an end that I would say is mosh worthy. These have to be eight of the most satisfying minutes in my entire CD collection. My other big favorite on St. Anger is "Sweet Amber". This song is pure Southern-styled fury, starting with a little twangy clean guitar intro to a fast riff bursting with groove. The drums go half time under the riff for the verse, injecting even more groove where it seemed no more would fit. The chorus ends in a molten lava phrase for James to gruffly harmonize the song's title so that I imagine him making the pained faces of old Blues singers when they can really feel it. After the standard two verse/chorus combinations, they take the song into a monolithically heavy riff that starts a little reserved with vocals and then instrumentally breaks into more crash cymbal abuse. It's a riff I can only describe as awesome, and one that sounds like no riff written by any band before. Even if those three songs were the only good music on the record, they would make the album worth checking out; fortunately, there are six other mighty acts of Metal for stereo destruction.

An album can have all the great material in the world, but poor production can come between the listener and the music. Some have complained about the recording quality of St. Anger, but I appreciate the raw feeling. Lars' snare rings like a church bell, the guitars are a little squashed while still retaining their bite, and the whole thing has a garage-quality rumble to it, so your speakers will vibrate inexplicably. Although I am sure the production values were a goal and the result of working with skilled and expensive producer Bob Rock and not the disguised blessing of having too little time and equipment, I appreciate the effort to take the band away from the overproduced sounds of recent recordings. The important thing is the album sounds unbelievable when it's cranked at full volume. In fact, it begs for maximum volume, and it fills every hole in the dynamic range of the human ears when it's loud. Also, listen with headphones to hear even more of the rawness the band left on the album.

It has great music and the production is deceptively incredible. So, why aren't there any guitar solos and why are most of James' and Kirk's parts the same? Why did they ever change their style on Load in the first place? I can't answer those questions with a whole lot of certainty. Really, only the band could. Maybe Kirk felt like he had nothing to prove because there is such a vast catalog already available of him playing inspiring solos. Maybe they felt it was a greater artistic challenge to practice restraint where they would have been more accustomed to showing off. Maybe they did sell out and write Load just for the money. Maybe they wrote Load and cut their hair and had no idea how far the new sound and image would take them. For centuries, people have tried to explain the whims of artists. It's interesting to read liner notes for a Classical CD and wonder if a long dead composer really made some musical choice because of the reason given in the text. Therefore, I think questioning why Metallica made certain compositional decisions is irrelevant. The relevant thing to examine is whether or not we like it and why we like it. That's really what music is about. Our reaction to art is more important than the artist's intentions.

If you're like me, you bought Load, were depressed for weeks, and didn't even bother with ReLoad after you heard "Fuel" on the radio. So, reappropriate those jewel cases for replacement and frisbee the CDs out the window or use them for coasters, but give St. Anger more of a chance than the title track you heard on the radio and all the complaining your friends did. I'm glad I looked beyond the hype.