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ST. ANGER
Last night I sat down with three things: 1) A Carton of smokes. B) A gallon jug of peppermint schnapps. 4) The new METALLICA disc, St. Anger. Sure, I had to dig through a few dumpsters to get these things, but I consider myself fairly resourceful...plus my usual dumpsters at the local WAL MART are pretty well-stocked. Anyway, for the past 24 hours, I've been chain-smoking, listening to St. Anger, and flicking cigarette ashes into an empty peppermint schnapps bottle (I went through it pretty fast..now my mouth smells like a minty ashtray, filled with decaying teeth...not the most pleasant scent as you might imagine).
I listened to the new Metallica offering much in the same way that I eat an orange...with several grains of salt...Because honestly, I didn't know if my boys from back on the strip (I remember way back when back on the strip when the guys in METALLICA would swing by my old apartment in Hollywood to mooch bolongna slices and screw-top wine off me for dinner) still had "it"... you know, "It"...that thing that makes you put your pants on in the morning, no matter how many times you pissed in them the night before.
St. Anger is what you get when you take Load, Reload, two of Metallica's LAST studio discs, and Master Of Puppets and ..And Justice For All...and you lock them in a hotel room for a few days to fuck each other in the ass until someone starts banging on the door because the shit-stink is getting so bad, and the clean towels have all been used up.
Right off the bat, I notice a few things about my buddies in Metallica:
a) Everyone's sober and/or married with children. This is not helping the situation.
b) They're back to pasting as many riffs together into one song as they can, making each song on the disc in between six and eight minutes long (not exactly what you'd call 'radio friendly'...but an edit or two here and there will fix that).
c) Ironically enough, they have become the band Jason Newsted was TRYING to get them to become before he left two years ago. A band of brothers who all contribute musically and lyrically to the construction of a song. You see, before, James and Lars would write everything...and anyone who offered up a negative opinion would get beaten with live cobras and soccer cletes until they agreed with the other members (well, so I've heard...or dreamed...I don't recall right now. I'm pretty fucking drunk).
d) You can spend millions of dollars and five years recording an album, and STILL have it wind up sounding like you made it in your garage on a shitty multi-track recorder. Bob Rock, what the fuck happened to all of those gut-kicking drum sounds you used to make? Those were cool. They worked for MOTLEY CRUE. They worked on The Black Album. Hell, they even worked on Load and ReLoad, and I think I peed on my copies a long time ago.
St. Anger is a desperate plea made by middle-aged headbangers to their fans to "please come back! We know we really fucked up with this Napster thing, but we're sorry...Now please come back and buy our harder, faster, longer, new album!" (With a nifty bonus DVD that includes a lot of cool video showing the band performing all of the songs from the new disc...that is, of course, if you LIKE the new disc)
I have to admit, as I listen to the deeper cuts, "Invisible Kid", "My World", and "Sweet Amber", I'm beginning to hear my old Metallica coming back. Hard-as-fuck, fist-pumping riffs that make you want to kick your roommate's teeth down his fucking throat (sorry Fritz). There's also lot of double-bass drumming and odd time signatures showing up, which tells me that at some point in the past five years, Lars has taken drumming lessons. James (or 'Jaymz' as he commonly refers to himself as) is NOT writing all of the lyrics on this disc, which I don't know if I like or not. I honestly was a big fan of the "Fuck you all, I'll bitch-slap you all until your penises fall off" lyrics he used to come up with...he's a little less moody on St. Anger.
You know what there ISN'T? Anywhere on this disc? A Guitar Solo. Kirk Hammet dun got himself out-voted on that one. Not a single guitar solo to be heard on St. Anger, which is a shame, because the last time I was with Kirk (which was some, oh...fifteen years ago), I taught him this cool guitar technique: It's called the 'Butttock Boogie'...and it's really wild. All you need is a dozen guitar picks (one for each finger and two for your penis), and you just go all gonzo on the strings until something catchy shows up. I never saw him use it though; not on stage, anyway.
Also, I don't dig the first single. "St. Anger" isn't the strongest song on the disc. It's certainly the most schizophrenic song on the disc (Hey look, we're the Foo Fighters...Now look, we're STAIND, now look, we're LIMP BIZKIT...and look, now we're back to being METALLICA!) That's probably the result of some A&R guy at Elektra saying "Let's release a sub-par song now, and if THIS song sells us a million records, imagine how many records we'll sell when we release the REALLY GOOD songs!"...God, I hope it's not my cousin Bud. Bud Buttrock. I still don't know how he got that fucking job. I think he walked in one day and said to the CEO "I have photos of you in a barn nailing a chicken, now gimme a job, or I call Larry Flynt!"...He had a job that afternoon, so he must have scared the right person.
A good track to release would be "Invisible Kid". You'd get the angry white kids all pissed and googly-eyed with that one. "My World" will MOST DEFINITELY appeal to old school Metallica fans who want a lot of crunch and a little bit of what we like to call 'melody'.
All being said (in my drunken state), this is a solid Metallica record. I do miss the smash-your-balls-with-the-kick-drum production that Bob Rock used to do wth them. I really miss that. I fucking HATE...and I mean HATE this new snare sound Lars has. That's two things I hate about his drumming now: The constant chewing behind the drums, and the new snare. Fuck, it sounds like you're banging on a stack of wood...knock it off, dude.
I can't wait to see Robert Trujillo play live with them. He does on the bonus DVD, but I'm talking about on stage. The guy stomps around like an ape when he plays, so I'd like to see him King-Kong his ass up and down the stage during a Metallica show once or twice on this tour. Again, I do find it extremely ironic that Jason bitched about them not writing as a "band" more, and that was one of the reasons he left...and now look, they're a bunch of brothers, writing, playing, and making music...as a band.
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