So I was puttering around on Amazon one day and ordering a CD for a friend anyways, so I decided to get the new Metallica album for two reasons. One being that I like Metallica and two being that I wanted that free shipping and couldn't think of another album I really wanted to buy. Well, reason one just got a bit lessened by this album.
St. Anger is one of the bigger pieces of crap I've had the misfortune to purchase (spend cash money on, poor me) or listen to. For somebody who can sing along key perfect to every song on the Black Album and do the same for most of the songs on Reload this album was such a disappointment that I can barely bring myself to keep the album in the car, much less play it.
I've liked Metallica for a while now. I always found their songs to not only have thoughtful and impressive lyrics, but rich music to back them up. The Black Album is one of the few albums which I'd consider a perfect album in how the songs are put together. I'm not saying that every song is 100% perfect, but how they fit together makes the album essentially perfect. A lot of time and effort was put into track order and selection of songs for that album. Now if only they taken a little tiny bit of that effort and used it on St. Anger.
St. Anger is not only less thoughtful in it's lyrics than any other Metallica album I've listened to but the lyrics are extremely repetitive on many of the songs. Seriously, how many times do I need to hear "frantic tock tick tock tick tock tick tock" in the first track Frantic? Do I really need to hear the chorus of the title track St. Anger that many times as well? The rest of the album is pretty much throw away as well with St. Anger being the only even slightly memorable song on the album, although Frantic does have a marginally neat music video.
Aside from the poor quality of the songs, the poor song selection, and everything else wrong the the content they have to go and make the cover art look like crap and put the CD part of it in a stupid sleeve while the DVD is in the regular space (first thing I did was switch them after I put a DVD into my car's CD player). You get a crappy design on the front, back, and inside of the cover to compliment it being annoying to get the disc out of when you first open it. Oh lucky days!
At this point though I took a long, hard look at this album and had to tell myself that we might be seeing the end of new Metallica songs which are even approaching halfway decent. I was happy to support Metallica through the Napster bullshit by buying two albums during that time, I was happy to see them get that MTV tribute because they've made some great music over the years, but I've very sad to see what's become of them in St. Anger. May Metallica and their music rest in peace.
About the rating: Its actually a 2.0, but an additional two points were added for Metallica putting out so many good songs and albums before this piece of crap.