St. Anger Review

Metallica make an album about coming apart while coming apart, film the entire process, and then release the result without repairing any of it. That is either the bravest decision of their career or the worst, and twenty years of argument has not settled which. The famous problem is the snare drum, which rings like a trash can lid on every track and was left that way deliberately.

The less famous problems are structural: no guitar solos, eleven songs averaging close to seven minutes, riffs stacked end to end with no transitions between them, and lyrics that read like the raw material of a therapy session because that is largely what they are. Some of it works. The title track has real venom in it, Frantic catches panic better than anything they had written in a decade, and the band sounds engaged for the first time since the early nineties.

Most of it does not. Critics split almost evenly on release, the favorable reviews praising the honesty and the hostile ones pointing out that honesty is not a substitute for editing, and the reputation has slid steadily since. The production is the reason. Strip the drum sound away and what remains is an ordinary Metallica record with good intentions and no shape at all.