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.

The first thing one notices about St. Anger is the production. Producer Bob Rock said that they were trying to capture the sound of “a band jamming together in a garage for the first time, and the band just happened to be Metallica”. That band also just happens to suck. I quite like “lo-fi” music. I think not giving everything a glitzy sheen can add a great sense of space, like you’re in the studio with the band. See: My Morning Jacket, The Walkmen, Department of Eagles. In other cases it can just make the music sound like a noisy, unprofessional mess that no one wants to hear. See: Metallica.

The guitar work is deplorable. In the small amount of time I’d spent listening to metal before St. Anger, I found that the thing I most appreciated was the guitar playing. A lot of these guys aren’t top-notch songwriters but they can play an axe like nobody’s business. I’m aware that Metallica has done plenty of solos in the past, but they’re totally absent in St. Anger. All that’s left is boring riffs played on down-tuned guitars. If Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing was like making love with music, this is like slowly humping a pile of mud.

Lars Ulrich’s drumming is pretty terrible too. It sounds like he’s banging on trashcans with hammers. It’s dull, flat, clangy, and it seems to serve no purpose. Besides, it’s so buried within the album’s wall of noise, who cares. James Hetfield growls and sneers out ever line with a voice who’s sense of anger or power has long since dissipated. It’s funny to think that he still believes his voice has much of an effect. It’s as familiar to people’s ears as Bono’s. These guys are professional musicians and they sound like fucking amateurs. The copy of the album that I downloaded was actually ripped from a CD that skipped at several points. At first I thought this was intentional, and then was disappointed that it wasn’t, since it would’ve been more interesting than anything actually done on the album.

And the worst part is that it goes on forever. The two most indulgent camps in the realm of popular music are rappers and metal bands, incapable of making albums that are any less than an hour long. This thing goes on for 75 minutes! There are moments where I thought it was never going to end. Every song is between 5 and 8 minutes long, and none of them sound like they should be over maybe 4 minutes long, or, y’know, any minutes long. They just go on and on with the same riffs. I have no opposition to long songs. There are songs that can totally justify it. None of these songs can do that. I get it, you guys want to pretend that you’re really terrible musicians and yell at me about how you’re angry about things and stuff.

That brings me to the lyrics, which were for more hilarious and poorly written than I ever could have imagined. The opening track, “Frantic”, sets the tone:

If I could have have my wasted days back
Would I use them to get back on track?
Stop to warm at karmas burning
Or look ahead, but keep on turning?

Do I have the strength
To know how I’ll go?
Can I find it inside
To deal with what I shouldn’t know?

Could I have my wasted days back
Would I use them to get back on track?

You live it or lie it!

My lifestyle determines my deathstyle

Keep searching, keep on searching
This search goes on, this search goes on

Frantic tick tick tick tick tick tick tock
Frantic tick tick tick tick tick tick tock

That search obviously didn’t lead him to a thesaurus, or to any kind of writing talent. There are so many things wrong with those lyrics, I don’t even know where to begin. “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle” is a lyrical offense on the level of “Are we human or are we dancer?” I don’t know what that even means. What is a deathstyle? Is this like, an anti-smoking PSA? Metallica do their best to sound brutal, but are hardly convincing. “Some Kind of Monster” features some bizarre chanting near the end, and “All Within My Hand” closes out the album with Hetfield horsely shouting “Kill! Kill! Kill!” All of this just comes off as funny when you imagine these guys going home to their mansions after their recording sessions. “I’d totally beat the shit out of you because I don’t even give a fuck and I’m so angry, but my manager probably wouldn’t advise it and my wife would be really mad.” You have to have something to back it up, guys. Those death metal guys are scary because they operate so far out of the mainstream. Avril Lavigne covers your songs. I’ve never heard Avril Lavigne cover a Mayhem song. Though I’d love to hear one if it’s floating around out there somewhere.

The first few tracks all feature laughable choruses. On “St. Anger”, Hetfield shouts “I’m madly in anger with you”. Okay. On “Some Kind of Monster” he asks “We the people/Are we the people?” Yes, I guess I am a person, and that most other people are also people. Thank you for making me ponder such an interesting question for 1 second. “Dirty Window” actually features these lyrics:

Projector
Protector
Rejector
Infector
Projector
Rejector
Infector
Infector
Dejector
Rejector

Or take the opening verse of “Invisible Kid”:

Invisible kid
Never see what he did
Got stuck where he did
Fallen through the grid
Invisible kid
Got a place of his own
Wher he’ll never be known
Inward he’s grown

Adult men wrote these words. Like, middle-aged guys who’ve been doing this for a long time. These lyrics sound like they were written by a 13-year-old.

Deleted scene from the “Some Kind of Monster” documentary.

In the end, St. Anger is probably not a very good candidate for the worst album of all time. Playing With Fire was far sillier and more poorly thought out. But St. Anger is certainly an atrocity in it’s own unique way. At this point, I have completely refrained from mentioning Metallica’s war on file-sharing. As many remember, Metallica was the first musical act to file suit against Napster. The resultant slew of lawsuits caused Napster to soon go out of business and forever set the music industry at odds with the internet.

The funny thing is that Metallica was implying in their actions that they were producing pieces of art that had real value, and managed to prove three years later that that was complete bullshit. They want people to pay for their music but they decide to suddenly abandon their former style, not in favor of something new or more interesting, but in favor of some kind of “lo-fi” ploy that just made them sound crappier than ever before. And they still managed to spend millions of dollars on it. Even the event that resulted in the suing of Napster makes them look silly: a song of theirs leaked early on Napster, a song they’d done for the Mission: Impossible II soundtrack. Wow, you guys sure keep it real.

They went on some big crusade in the name of art and supporting artists and then produced something like the musical equivalent of a child’s angry finger painting. So in conclusion:

Have you heard the worst album of all time? Tell us! We’re always looking for recommendations. If you think you know something just crappy enough to be a contender, leave a comment about it.