Did anyone else here enjoy St. Anger?

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Despite all of the flak that it gets, I actually think St. Anger is a great album. It's raw, passionate, intense, and emotional, and the so-called "poor" production actually helps to highlight this. The lyrics, which many people have described as being overly-introspective, actually strike a serious chord with me as well. Rock stars don't have it as easy as people think they do, and it's fairly obvious the members of Metallica were going through some tough s**t when they were recording this. The bloody thing barely even managed to get finished, let alone released!

One song off the album of particular note to me is "The Unnamed Feeling". It almost perfectly describes what it's like to have an anxiety/panic attack, and I listened to this song a lot during a particularly rough period of my life. I can relate to some of the other songs on the album as well (namely "Frantic", "Invisible Kid", "St. Anger").

(warning, some bad language)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVpJFCYzi0[/youtube]

If you like songs with raw emotional lyrics, like some of KoRn's output, I definitely recommend checking this album out.

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 04 May 2014, 7:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

St Anger (in my opinion) suffers because of the length of the songs. It would be a much better album if it was half an hour long instead of 75 minutes. If the songs were between 2-4 minutes instead of 5-9 minutes in length then I would probably enjoy it more.

I've heard that argument before, and while I can see why others would think that, I personally enjoy really long songs. Metallica just isn't Metallica unless the songs are at least 6 minutes long.

I'd say the album is less hated now than immediately upon the release because we now have a more terrifying album in Lulu to compare St Anger to.

Lulu is hilarious, but I wouldn't call it a great album. If I ever learn how to play guitar, I want to learn the riff from "The View" so I can play it over and over while shouting "I AM THE TABLE!" at the top of my lungs.



Anyhow, I was just listening to the album again earlier on, and upon hearing the lyrics for "Invisible Kid", I found that they paint a surprisingly accurate picture of what it can be like to be autistic. I'm not sure if it's the original intent, but it's certainly compelling.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42iQZXs23ng[/youtube]

I prefer more melodic, "pretty" metal. While Metallica was one of the most aggressive bands around when they started, their early material has a much prettier sound in comparison to St. Anger. The big problem isn't as much as it's terrible, as it's the opposite sound of what people associate with Metallica, all raw and nu-metally instead of fast and complex. Also, I agree with Punk89, there is a reason punk songs are usually pretty short. It's because short works better for simple and aggressive unless you are also trying to make some sort hypnotic thing. I think the lyrics are fine, the song instrumentals just aren't particularly engaging. I will say I really love the drum sound on the album, it's slow but really hard hitting.

I think the drum sound on St. Anger is fantastic. People give it crap for supposedly sounding poor, but I think it fits well with the tone of the music. The snare drum sound in particular makes it sound like Lars is pounding away on random objects like trash cans, and I think that's awesome!

And like I mentioned before, while I personally have a preference for long drawn-out songs, I can see why other people wouldn't like them. Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong decade, in that I prefer listening to whole albums at a time rather than just different random songs.

Love the trash can sound.

Anyway, I like long songs sometimes, one of my favorite artists (Tarby) has songs that average at around 7 minutes and his longest one is half an hour, but I think the style of St. Anger is better suited for shorter songs.

The songs on St. Anger can get a bit repetitive, I admit, but it's not much of a change for me considering I often listen to EDM tracks of about the same length. Those can be even MORE repetitive.

Well, yeah, the longer songs I listen to usually tend to be more progressive in nature, and I generally like my longer songs to be slower.

I like the sort of "entrancing" effect long, repetitive songs can have. I don't just mean songs in the trance genre either, I mean any sort of long song based around a repetitive drum pattern, guitar riff, etc.

For a good example, listen to the first track of this Fear Factory remix EP:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8ZT0wBNYiM[/youtube]

It's true of any rock/metal band to ever exist, if they change from their original style, their fans will resent them for it and pray they never have to hear it played live. Which is sad, because when bands stick to their style forever it gets stale in my opinion.

I haven't listened to the whole album, but I love the song.

In my opinion everything of Metallica's work after they cut their hair was pretty bad such as St. Anger, Death Magnetic, Load, and Reload. All of those albums were put out their just for sales.

I thought the same way until I actually sat down and listened to them. Load and Reload are great alternative rock albums, and St. Anger has a lot of passion and emotion. Death Magnetic, on the other hand was just an average hard rock/metal album, and it's the most sell-outish of the bunch. It's not a bad album, save for the production, but it didn't have any really memorable songs or an interesting overarching theme.

If you really want to get technical, I even used to think the Black Album wasn't worth my time, until I was bored in class one day and decided to load it up on my iPod. It blew me away with how awesome it actually was. Why did I have it on my iPod if I didn't think it was worth my time? I'm not entirely sure, but I'm guessing it's because I had 60GB to fill, and I wanted to make use of it. I had tons of stuff on there I didn't normally listen to, and I guess I kept it all on there in case one day the urge struck to listen to some of that stuff.

From what I've heard Load/Reload are definitely NOT alternative rock, they are heavy metal/blues rock/hard rock(heavy metal + blues rock), and Death Magnetic isn't hard rock, it's full out thrash metal. Aside from your genre labels, I agree with your sentiments. Everything up to St. Anger has been them experimenting, while Death Magnetic was them returning to thrash to appeal to old fans, which is selling out.