Metallica’s James Hetfield Asked Us to Give St. Anger “Another Chance,” So I Did
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The post Metallica’s James Hetfield Asked Us to Give St. Anger “Another Chance,” So I Did appeared first on Consequence.
“Question,” Metallica frontman James Hetfield said to the crowd at Lollapalooza 2022. “St. Anger?” He held two thumbs up in the air to a mixed reaction. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said ruefully. He then flipped his thumbs down, once again exclaiming, “St. Anger?” as he smiled through a hail of jeers.
“Give it another chance, okay? This was the album that did not get the chance.”
So I did.
I first heard Metallica’s eighth and most derided LP following its release in 2003. This was in high school, after I learned that the local mall housed other stores besides Hot Topic, when I attempted to introduce color into my wardrobe (an orange vest worn over an orange shirt remains a particularly painful memory). I didn’t vibe with St. Anger, but I chalked it up to diverging tastes. We were too different, Metallica and me; they were still into thrash aggression, whereas I had absolutely no idea how much orange to wear.
Years later I checked in again, this time as a baby music journalist doing the baby music journalist equivalent of potty training (writing my first listicle). By now I’d heard all the complaints — that snare drum! — and while I enjoyed a couple of St. Anger riffs as I powered through Metallica’s discography, I was listening-on-a-deadline, which is a close cousin of not listening at all.
More than half a decade later Metallica launched into “Dirty Window” at Lollapalooza 2022, and the song felt charged with purpose. Part of this may have been Hetfield’s plea that St. Anger deserved another chance. Metallica only played one song from 2016’s Hardwired… To Self-Destruct, and as for 2008’s Death Magnetic and Lulu, the 2011 collaboration with Lou Reed, they may as well have not existed. But Hetfield was adamant about the virtues of old St. Anger. He really believes in that album.
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Live, “Dirty Window” kicks ass. The bang-bang intro steps up into a furious assault of rising triplets. The sudden softness of the refrain, “I’m judge and I’m jury and I’m executioner, too,” is disorienting. Metallica have always been willing to blow by us with speed, but like a wily pitcher, they’re now fooling us with the slow stuff, too.
Hetfield would never have allowed himself to sound this pretty earlier in his career, but live this, too, made sense. The band used these slightly easier choruses to conserve energy, so that the nearly-60-year-old rockers could hit the verses with a ferocity of which many younger fans could only dream. You wilI probably never see these words again, but I couldn’t wait to listen St. Anger.
The good news is, St. Anger is not as bad as I remember. The snare that had everyone so worked up isn’t all that intrusive, though the mix on the drums is consistently odd, pushing the higher-pitched parts of the kit and neglecting the bass. But that’s hardly a crime against music; after all, in this digital age, everyone on the planet can have their own unique drum sound, so why shouldn’t Lars Ulrich get to play around with the high notes?
St. Anger also boasts a fair share of fun tunes. “Dirty Window” has that killer curveball, “Some Kind of Monster” reinterprets old-school grunge through a metal framework, and “Frantic” is a sonic anxiety attack. As for the title track, “St. Anger” remains a fascinating oddity, though it also falls into the potholes that tear up Metallica’s later songwriting.
Metallica’s early masterpieces all pit the band — and us — against overwhelming forces. The Sandman wins, the Master of Puppets wins, Ktulu wins (lyrics or no lyrics), and the protagonist of “Ride the Lightning” dies in the electric chair. The singular frustration driving Metallica’s most iconic music is the frustration of total defeat.
But this rage began to dry up in Metallica’s second and third decades, perhaps because the band kept winning. They moved on to celebrations of adrenaline; less the high-stakes drama of masters and slaves, and more, “Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire. Ooh.”
As time went along, there were a lot more, “Oohs.”
Besides that, the climate was poised for a backlash. Fans widely mocked the 2000 lawsuit Metallica v. Napster Inc., and as the band sounded the alarm about the potential consequence of not paying for music, they were parodied as greedy in early viral videos. History has vindicated Metallica. Napster began the cultural norm of audiences demanding free music, and that enduring expectation, more than Spotify’s paltry payout rate, has been disastrous for music’s middle class.
But most people didn’t realize where the music industry was headed by that 2000 lawsuit, and in 2003 Metallica released St. Anger to widespread boos. In retrospect, some of the backlash had nothing to do with the music. Perhaps, too, the backlash had been a long time coming, as Load and Reload lay untouched in CD racks around the world. St. Anger isn’t when Metallica fell off, but it is certainly when everyone noticed.
The title track is part of that conversation. The lyrics, “Fuck it all and no regrets,” don’t rise to the level of the thrilling musical cacophony, and whether or not Hetfield is wearing “St. Anger ’round my neck,” he doesn’t give listeners a reason to feel angry, too. It’s a gesture in the direction of their old frustration; a lightning bug instead of an electric chair.
“Shoot Me Again” is another advertisement for adrenaline, like being inundated with Monster Energy commercials. “Invisible Kid” grasps at the band’s increasingly-distant memory of adolescence. “My World” rails against various “motherfuckers,” and it’s hard not to think of how low Metallica had set their ambitions, for a group that once wrestled with the Master of Puppets to face off against “motherfuckers,” a bargain bin insult. Some albums go downhill in the second half; this one falls off a cliff.
But these complaints could also apply to just about every album from 1996’s Load to 2016’s Hardwired… To Self Destruct. And you know what? That’s fine. From 1983 to 1991 Metallica had one of the greatest five album runs in music history. St. Anger did little to burnish that legacy, but it produced a handful of singles that most longtime fans would be happy to hear padding out the hits at concerts another 20 years from now. I don’t know about you, but that’s all I want out of a band I fell in love with in middle school.
So crack open a beer, light a joint, maybe ice those knees while you’re at it, and throw on St. Anger until you get bored. And perhaps if James Hetfield polls you on St. Anger, you can cheer when he puts his thumbs up, not only because you appreciate the work, but because you know he won’t be playing more than one song.
Metallica’s James Hetfield Asked Us to Give St. Anger “Another Chance,” So I Did
Wren Graves
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