St Anger
Metallica
(Elektra)

On first listen the new one from Metallica comes across as horrible sounding, tinny piece of crap - and it doesn't get much better with subsequent listens. First of all, Lars' drums sound like he is hitting a bunch of overturned oil cans like a street drummer in a 3rd world country. The production is horrendous, you have probably heard better sounding demos from unsigned bands. (This what some who have praised this album refer to as "raw".) The fact that it was probably deliberate makes the entire thing even dafter. Just in case you didn't think having to listen to the album was bad enough, a DVD is included of the band rehearsing the entire album. The sound is slightly better but the material still mostly sucks. To be fair the album does get slightly better with multiple plays. It goes from being a 0 to the current rating after about 5 plays. The title track is pretty decent, as is 'All within my Hands', but other than that this is pretty cack. The fact it is over 70 minutes of music makes it even worse. My advice is to avoid this badly produced, poorly performed, piece of excrement and get the new Voivod. Metallica are trying to be "art-house" metal I think and fail miserably. It is much better to get Voivod's latest (with Jason Newsted in tow) that is a decent avant-garde metal album well worth the investment. There are those that say reviews like this aren't giving the new album a chance and there are some like my mate Martin who has given it a fairly favourable review, ditto some on this site. I bet even those reviewers will find themselves, more often than not, reaching for pre-Load stuff before listening to this CD. It might be hip and trendy to claim to like St Anger, but I bet that will fade fast. A short unscientific poll of local record shop staff showed that most of their customers hated it but a few loved it. Metallica have come damn near close to releasing an un-listenable album. If this is the type of crap they are going to release, they should hang it up. Don't believe the hype, the bad reviews are on the money.

Rating: 2