ST. ANGER

St. Anger is everybody's favourite bash-Metallica album. While it's certainly not good and has plenty of reasons to serve as an ideal album to sharpen you vitriol-drenched review writing skills, Metallica has worse albums so I'll try to support them for a change.

A first reason for the criticism is obvious, the damn sound of the thing. Especially the snare drum is downright ridiculous. But apparently it is the way they wanted it to sound. A second reason is also obvious. All songs are waaaaay too long. Also, half of the songs fail to add anything and make the album wear out, long before it's completed.

That is all true but there are good things here and well. Most of all this album signals a welcome return to energy and anger in Metallica's sound. Each new album in the 90's had only been topping the previous in lacklustre song writing and sloppy performance. St. Anger is a welcome return to aggression and simple & sharp metal riffs. Even if they don't come near to past excellence, it's still an improvement over all the deflated unload disasters.

If Metallica had not only opted for a garage sound and attitude, but also for garage song writing, they could have trimmed down the fat on each of these songs and could have created a very powerful 40 minute album. Well, they didn't and they even made the same mistake on the overhyped Death Magnetic.