I was a metal guy in high school. A hessian, a hesher, a load, a metalhead, whatever. Metallica wasn’t my favorite band, but they were pretty much always my second favorite. They were the band that everyone into any sort of guitar-music remotely aggressive in nature was into. I’m pretty much preaching to the choir here, because if you listened to Metallica back then (late 80’s, early 90’s) you know what I’m talking about and if you didn’t you probably won’t ever know.
Metallica has basically sucked for the past few albums. The black album (titled simply Metallica, the one after …And Justice for All) was the end of anything listenable from them. I don’t know what happened, but I was pretty much personally offended when it did happen. They turned into an everyday crappy rock band. Their latest album, St. Anger, was supposed to be a bit of a return to the ‘old’ Metallica… harder and rawer. I applauded the effort but didn’t really feel the need to check it out. Then I read an article about the production of the album in Sound on Sound magazine and it sounded like they went through and interesting process to create it. That intrigued me enough to give it a listen. On first listen… It’s definitely harder and rawer than their past several crap albums… but there’s still something completely missing from it. It just doesn’t have that thing in it that was what Metallica was all about. Listening to Master of Puppets again tonight completely confirmed it. They used to have something really going on… and they lost it somewhere along the way. I’m going to give the St. Anger songs some more listens, but I’m not real optimistic about it growing on me.
One reply on “So, about that newish Metallica album”
Cliff Burton
That’s all you need to remember. “And Justice for All” was the last album that had significant input from Cliff. Also it seemed like Cliff was the last thing keeping Lars from selling out. Everything post-Cliff has no complexity to the music. What would have been a single ten second riff in Master of Puppets became an entire song on the Black Album.