Opinz

The Worst Albums of All Time: Metallica – St. Anger (2003)

When it comes to music, we here at Opinz are sincerely interested in the good, the bad and the very, very ugly. With this interest in mind, we are undertaking a quest to examine the seedy underbelly of music, to dig to the bottom of the barrel and take a look at those albums that are widely regarded as the worst of the worst. Every week, we take a look at a candidate and determine whether or not they truly deserve their reputation as a musical disaster. Enjoy.

In this second week, we’re taking a look at Metallica’s St. Anger. This is mainly because of a certain person who runs this site, who hates this thing with a dark, fiery passion that he usually only reserves for squinting masks and Robert Smith. I don’t want to speak for him, but I think it’s safe to say that if St. Anger was a person, he would pay good money to skull-rape it to death, and then probably pee on it or something. He really doesn’t like it.

The album has a mostly mixed reputation. Some like it, many are neutral towards it. Pitchfork hated it so much that they wrote one of their most pretentious reviews ever about it. (Which is saying something for Pitchfork.) I went into it unsure of what I would hear. I’m not a metal fan by any measure and had never heard a Metallica album before. I was worried if I’d even be able to properly judge it’s quality. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I can safely say that St. Anger sucks fucking donkey balls.

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U2 – Get On Your Boots

“Get On Your Boots” is being heralded as a return to the Achtung Baby and Zooropa era of U2, but if this is even true it’s only in the guitar production; it wouldn’t make the cut on either album and the lyrical and song writing quality is barely that of a warm-up jam, complete with overlooped and abrupt instrumental changes and nonsensical lyrics…in reality the song is more in line with the astoundingly uninspired pap the band vomited forth on Pop, and this time not even Brian Eno could rescue it. More »

The Derek Trucks Band – Already Free

Derek Trucks is a guitar prodigy, famously having toured with The Allman Brothers Band since he was eleven before not only eventually joining them but starting his own very similarly themed band, and therein lies the appeal of The Derek Trucks Band and their latest album Already Free – if you can’t get enough Allman Brothers this is obviously a great record; well crafted, well written, and well played…but for 99% of the population, having one Allman Brothers is already enough and makes Already Free an incredibly redundant listen. More »

Bryan Scary & The Shredding Tears – Flight of the Knife

With energetic enthusiasm and punk-esque bombast, Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tear insert so many tempo changes into Flight of the Knife that it’s entirely surprising that they manage to not lose sight of creating accessible pieces of pop More »

Antony and the Johnsons – The Crying Light

Antony and the Johnson’s newest LP is musically not too dissimilar from 2005′s I Am a Bird Now – greeting the listener with sparse and lovely instrumentation and Antony Hegarty’s uniquely soul-shaking voice – but the lyrical focus has shifted from Hegarty’s inner-self to the natural world, without losing the massive emotional weight of his previous work, particularly on medatative album highlights like “Her Eyes Are Underneath the Ground” and the deathbed ballad “Another World”.

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The Offspring – Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace

Let’s face it – The Offspring have been on cruise control since Smash, and while they have churned out a couple of successful, if not quirky, singles their albums have been, for the most part, full of fluff; unmemorable and alarmingly uninspired – but Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace does a fairly decent job of reversing this trend; there are no gimmicks a la “Original Prankster” or “Pretty Fly” and that goes a long way in legitimizing the album as a whole…it’s not perfect but it is definitely more balanced. More »