Self Observational Sunday: A'int Anger

So Metallica's Saint Anger is 10 years old this year. The album was arguably one of the biggest letdowns in Rock Music (before Chinese Democracy a few years later). Years of building towards this release was met with immediate confusion. It's not just considered Metallica's worst album but one of the worst albums ever produced.

All I knew about this album was that I hated the title track and there was a documentary about the making of it. While I'm not a huge Metallica fan I decided to pick up the album (it was only $2 at a used CD store) out of curiosity.

Here's the thing. I didn't hate it.

I mean the album is awful. But the potential level for this to be amazing is compelling. The way I see if, if a band got into a studio and recorded this properly this would be an amazing album. There's three things that need to be fixed, they're the issues with the whole album.

1) The Lyrics
2) The Song Length
3) The Music

Now the issue is that without those 3 things you just have an album of complete silence. I think if you fix #2 that will indirectly fix #1. If you were to cut the song length down and make the average song length 4-5 minutes long (as opposed to the current average of 6-8) you won't be repeating the truly awful lyrics over and over again (drawing more attention to how bad they truly are).

As for the music. The things that you want from a Metallica song are there. It's just that the great riffs are buried under tin pan sounding drums and awful mixing.

What I'm saying the album is terrible .... but no reason to not relisten to it and wish that it was recorded differently.