Today will be a twofer. First I will do an inevitable, completely unoriginal but personally necessary savaging of Metallica's St. Anger and then shift to their newest album, Death Magnetic, simply to contrast why they've sort of redeemed themselves and why they still suck. First things first.
St. Anger needs no explanation, really, for those familiar with it. It's possibly one of the worst albums ever, notwithstanding from whom and under what circumstances it came to be. Thankfully, as the new album will show, this album seems to have been their proverbial low point: whining, introspective (dare I say "emo") lyrics, Lars the Grouch banging his trash cans, weakly repetitive riffs in songs with no discernible melodies, themes, structure or anything resembling rational order. They tried to sound raw; they instead sounded raucous and unkempt. They tried to sound aggressive; they sounded like someone lit a bag of poop on their porch and ran. Long, unending and diffuse, this is the messiest, most awfully conceived, written or produced poseur of an album by any metal/rock/alternative band ever (except perhaps for Coldplay's two recent fetuses). Not owning it means one more slot on your CD rack, or the equivalent of roughly 70MB of free space on your hard drive, iPod, etc. I actually own it, but that's more because I'm a diseased OCD completionist. So hurrah to those of you who enjoy this kind of garbage. I certainly don't. And for those who seek to come to its defense -- shame on you; I won't even stoop to indulge you. F
5 comments:
Lars needed to tune his snare on this album. I never got over that. It was just "ping ping ping" with the rest of the band playing some stuff that never even caught my attention. I hope this pile of shit is out of print.
The drums are atrocious. Even, and that's a big even, the music was actually good otherwise, those drums completely kill it. It's like getting a cut in-between your fingers that takes forever to heal and constantly stings. Sometimes one little thing builds up to an explosion of reactive insanity. Those drums do it.
I actually feel dirtier listening to this than Coldplay if you know what I mean. Martin has always been a pretencious twat, but The Het-Ah used to be cool =(
God, you mean you still listen to this?
Not by choice but the hard station here loves it. Of course they have Marconi as a dj so saying they suck would be repetitive.
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