Coffin Shakers: Metallica – St. Anger

There is a moment in the making of video for The Phantom Menace where, considering young actors to portray childhood Anakin Skywalker, George Lucas decides on a particular youngster that I am not going to rag on here, but was clearly not the best choice. After making this proclamation, yes man Rick McCallum opens his mouth and a stream of congratulations and agreements pour out, while a
room full of other people working on the movie look around confused and, dare I say, stunned. This set up is more or less what I imagine life is like around Metallica between about 1995 and the present day. A band, like Lucas, whose work has made generations of kids into lifelong fans, a legacy that was cemented long before the dark days came along and a career as controversial and debatable as any. 

St. Anger ends up being Metallica in trying-to-be-cool-uncle mode, an effort to show kids these days that they not only knew how to rock back in their day, but that they still can and, not only that, but that they can rock the way the kids these days do. An auditory Uncle Rico, if you will. Released in 2003 (really, that long ago?), St. Anger was billed as being a ‘return to form’ album, promising a return to the metal roots of the band that many people had thought sullied by the more mainstream pair of Load and ReLoad. The band faced a variety of tribulations during the making of the album, much of which was chronicled in the documentary “Some Kind of Monster,” which in truth is the bulk of my expose to this album. Despite having bought it the day it was released, I’ve probably only heard the album in its entirety three or four times, not counting the three times I’ve listened to it prior to writing this, and I’ve seen that documentary probably seven or eight times. It was a record dead on arrival, and the documentary is at various times a truly sobering testament to this, as you get to watch people working on a thing that they don’t really care about doing, and also don’t seem to know what to do with.

And man does that sentiment shine through on this album. By now, so much has been said against this album that I am battling back feelings of this being a pointless review, and so many forced positives have been floated out there. But St. Anger does not at all sound like a Metallica album. At least not a Metallica album from a Metallica thirty something years into their career at that point, or a Metallica that had released classic pillars like Master of Puppets or even respectable mainstream accepted metal like the self-titled Black album. This is like a demo tape from a garage band of teenagers who don’t really know what they want to do with a song, or don’t know how to write a song, or don’t believe in not playing everyone’s ideas so they don’t hurt anyone’s feelings by leaving something out. Each song is an amalgamation of several pieces, connected by sometimes sloppily executed transitions. If this were a demo from a new band, one could listen and pick out a handful of quality ideas that, given refinement and nurturing, could wind up making for good eventual songs. By for a Metallica-level band, they are a sloppy collection of half ideas. When I was in college I would jam with some friends and we would routinely leave a tape recorder on the floor to capture our output. When I was in my twenties, playing with a real band, we would occasionally go off on these winding jam sessions where we’d just play and see what developed. That is what St. Anger feels like. But that’s not how the album came to be, and if you’ve seen “Some Kind of Monster,” you know that: the writing period was largely blown due to personal conflicts and matters, and the recording took place over a grueling period of time where individual members would come in to the studio and play for a bit, and then just sit around. Metallica as disaffected teenage garage band.

For sure, there are some decent moments on the album. Singles “Frantic” and the title track have some legitimate goodness and seem to be actually thought out songs, although in the long run they are merely the best of a bad bunch. The other nine songs on the album run the gamut between tough guy bullshit (“Shoot Me Again”), good ideas drawn out to absurdity (“Some Kind of Monster”), why did they do that-type head scratching decisions (“Invisible Kid”), attempts at soul searching (“The Unnamed Feeling”), flat out terrible (“My World,” “All Within My Hands,” “Purify,” “Sweet Amber”) and pretty decent (“Dirty Window”). 

“Some Kind of Monster” is a good song musically, but the lyrics are forced and ultimately overwrought, as you can hear it in Hetfields’ voice that he’s got to get two more verses out of this song, so he has to torture less and less credible anatomical listings out of this metaphor. A puzzling interlude line of “we the people/are we the people” eventually runs into the main chorus of the title, resulting in a very, very brief spark of interest from the listener (“are we the people or/ some kind of monster”), but it comes minutes too late in the actual interest curve of the song, and actually sounds more like a poorly executed edit than a purposely executed maneuver. A similar bad decision absolutely cripples what would have been far and away the best song on the album. “Invisible Kid,” were there any justice in the universe, would have stopped at exactly 4 minutes and 57 seconds. Had that been the way of things, it would have been a fast paced, interesting riffed song that was doing most, if not all the heavy lifting for the record. Instead, the band takes a minute and a half of a breakdown, slowing the pace of a jam and covering it with literal whining before trying to torture the song back to its previous life by a return to the good part. And the lyrics. While they had been slipping in the lyrical department since the Black album, nothing in the Metallica catalog even approaches this one: to call this the first draft of an angry emo high schoolers’ poetry would be an insult to said high schoolers’ poetry. Even the old in praise of metal songs from Kill ‘em All are like Tolstoy by comparison. 

“Dirty Window” ends up being perhaps the best all-around song, even though it too has issues. It is a song reminiscent of the deep cuts on ReLoad, that kind of “Prince Charming” or “Attitude” type of song, decent but ultimately a meh entry, one that is prolonging a fair album that probably wouldn’t suffer for leaving it out. But here, it’s a good galloping tune that has a reasonable interlude section, and it is of reasonable length. Right around five minutes, the song doesn’t get the chance to wander away and get lost in itself. Sad, when a song best described as one of the unnecessaries on Load or ReLoad is the buried treasure on a Metallica album. “The Unnamed Feeling” has, again, some neat ideas in it, sort of reminiscent of something like the really underappreciated “Bleeding Me” or “The Outlaw Torn” from Load. But, again, if the best the album can muster is weaker versions of songs from weak albums, I’m not sure there’s much of an upside to that. 

This is a running issue with the album. Songs are too long without anything to justify their length. A few riffs on the album are cool, but none of them cool enough to warrant seven minutes of use. Seemingly out of nowhere there’s a bridge or an interlude, like they were trying to figure out what to do next. Again, the recording process as depicted in the documentary was a tortured and hectic experience, but from just the album, it sounds like they just recorded a jam session. Taken together with the documentary, it seems like St. Anger is the result of a frantic effort following literal years of procrastination, the school project begun and completed the very last day of Winter Break after weeks of video games and “I’ll do it tomorrow”s. Vocals seem rushed, like the lyrics don’t work with the music but rather than address this they just muscled their way through the problem, giving things at times an amateurish feel that kind of makes you cringe. This may sound horrible, but if it came out that this album was the product of a drug fueled chapter in the bands’ life, I’d not only believe it, but it would make sense logically given the disjointed, confused nature of many of the compositions. But again, the documentary shows that this album comes together while James is in rehab. If new bassist Rob Trujilio came in and had to write his parts separately from the rest of the band, I could point to the album and say that was the cause of its randomness and lack of focus, but Trujilio came on after the album was recorded, and the bass on the album was played by producer Bob Rock before he was fired. 

Much has been made about the production of the album as well, from the buzzy guitars to the awful snare drum. There is something about the guitar sound that strikes a particular chord for me, but the album doesn’t sound like Metallica. Also missing are guitar solos, something that Kirk Hammett was vocal and absolutely correct about in the documentary. The lack of solos would tie the album to that early 2000s “metal” sound, he argued, while Lars and James spoke of that omission would give the album a fresher, more contemporary sound. Here’s where cool guy uncle Metallica comes along. The early 2000s were living in the aftermath of the brief ascension of rap and nu-metal, a sonic category that is trapped in the amber of that time. The sound seemingly arrived fully formed, and had little to no variation at all over its three to five year shelf life. Someone I knew once referred to the band that created St. Anger as “Metallikorn,” a portmanteau of the real band and the one they seemingly tried to emulate on this album, and it is quite a challenge to listen to this album and hear the same band that wrote “Phantom Lord” or “Battery”. I am not saying that a band cannot experiment with their sound or change their approach or anything of the sort. But this sounds like James Hetfield is singing for a totally different band. When Zeppelin experimented, they incorporated reggae; when Sabbath changed their sound, they got Dio; when Metallica experimented, they wrote St. Anger. It has been said that this is a Metallica album free of commercial influence or trends, but then we return to the Rick McCallum  moment: I can envision a room full of people listening to the demos of this album, saying “Man, that is a song that is free of commercial influence,” and “I don’t hear any trendy things in that at all,” while other people just look around confusedly. Pshaw. This album is practically Metallica’s love letter to the radio “metal” sound of the early 2000s. If you look at some of the in-the-moment critical responses to this album, they all say the same basic thing: a great, raw album. Visceral. Maddening statements, like this is somehow the return of Kill ‘em All. My personal favorite: the producer, Bob Rock, said that this is like a garage band jam, if the garage band was Metallica. All those Rick McCallums, all those accolades while the rest of the room looks on and wonders what is happening. 

So much has been said about this album being awful that even the inevitable contrarianism has long since run its course. That whole group of people who somehow loved this album because they ‘understood’ it somehow, the ironic appreciation crowd. This is an album made by an aging band that is trying to find some way of connecting with a younger fan base. The 90s albums saw Metallica doing whatever they claimed they wanted to and at very least garnered controversy: people liked or hated Load and ReLoad. But the people who liked them don’t really seem to have stuck around with the band, and while both albums really, really do have some good material, a lot of it is throwaway music, things that would never in a million years wind up in the live set and if they did would most likely be met with puzzlement and polite acceptance. I can’t imagine a crowd getting super stoked when James says “This next one’s called ‘Waste My Hate!’”, just as I can’t imagine some guy in the crowd being like “Fuck yes, it’s ‘Sweet Amber!!’” I personally think that 2008’s follow up Death Magnetic is a great album, so I can’t say that the band completely gave up in 2003 with St. Anger, but this is a record of a Metallica well beyond the point of caring. A lot of the professional reviews for this mention Metallica ‘getting back to their roots’ or ‘recapturing the style of their youth’ or ‘going back to what made them great in the first place’ or ‘not caring about the critics and just jamming.’ But the Metallica those reviews are referencing as being returned to is not the Metallica of yore. It is the Metallica of the 90s, and they are critics who bought the idea that Metallica cut their hair and recorded a country ballad because that was the influence of commercial music media, bending the band under its weight, trying to get Metallica to be what the radio stations wanted Metallica to be. If that were true, then St. Anger would in fact be some angry return to something. But those reviews all seem to forget that Metallica was bending themselves more and more to the mainstream, years before Load, that the Black album was as commercial and radio friendly an album as a legit metal band was ever going to be capable of making. If St. Anger were some kind of return to an older version of the band, then why is it the one album that sticks out more than any others from the rest in terms not of quality, but of incongruity with the rest of the catalogue, and in terms of radical departure from established sound? Even the 90s albums follow the template set by the Black album; this one is a strange one-off. 

 And it is a bad album, one that makes me cringe at points. I was listening to this in the car, and I was super self-conscious about whether people in other cars or on the sidewalk were judging me for playing it. That is not supposed to happen, and never in the twenty years of the Loads had I felt that. It’s that feeling that the old guy trying to be cool elicits, or that reaction that I hope for when I purposely misuse some current slang in front of my college aged students. I talk about “watching Netflix and chilling with as many people as possible,” because they all get a little disgusted either at the mental image or the old man being out of touch-effect, and I get a good laugh out of their responses.