Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [218]
Conceived by committee, not even the band liked all of it. According to Kirk, only four songs got all four votes (including Bob’s) to be on the record. Rock’s anti-production hardly helps, the various sections of each song shuffled and reshuffled before being cut-and-pasted together on a computer screen. Later, Kirk would complain that he had recorded over a hundred guitar parts in the course of the album, but had no idea where each had been used, or why most hadn’t. Rob Trujillo, he added, was not the only one who had to learn the songs from scratch before they could play them live. David Bowie and Brian Eno may have done similar things with their music in the past, U2 and Radiohead also. But this was musical experimentation on a level previously unknown in hard rock.
As if to somehow sugar the pill, when St. Anger was released in June 2003, it came in a bewilderingly naff Pushead-designed sleeve – a comic book image of a bunched fist with a rope knotted around the wrist. This only served to further confuse critics already hostile to its self-conscious attempts at radicalism. Reviews were almost uniformly sour. Rolling Stone called it ‘a mea culpa to long-time devotees as the now Newsted-less trio crafted a complex riff marathon once more, this time accompanied by cathartic lyrics from a newly sober, therapy-suffused Hetfield. But production oddities – such as a drum sound that makes Lars Ulrich sound like a two-year-old banging pots and pans with a spoon – are jarring. And poor Kirk Hammett, the band’s soloist and a man who has weathered the squabbles of the two figureheads for twenty years, is rewarded with no solos. Now there’s something to be angry about.’ For most first-time listeners, says Alexander Milas, ‘St. Anger was an absolute mess’.
Metallica’s marketing director told Kirk the album was ‘a fucking commercial disaster’. Relatively speaking, he was right. Although it reached Number One in America and another dozen countries, and Number Three in the UK, overall St. Anger sold approximately half of what S&M had done and remains probably their most unpopular album, more so even than the obsequious Reload. ‘It still annoys me to this day,’ says writer and long-time Metallica chronicler Joel McIver, ‘because the band regard it as a symbol of rebellion and a catalyst for change when in reality it’s just a collection of dull riffs and puerile lyrics.’ For the first time since Master of Puppets, however, Metallica weren’t out primarily to make an album that pleased fans or critics, but to please themselves; an album that spoke to them on the deepest level, come what may. In this regard, it could be argued, they succeeded completely; that St. Anger should be viewed in the same historical light as equally personal, often misunderstood, even loathed albums as Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night, Bowie’s Low, John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band; as feral as the demented Funhouse by The Stooges; as self-pitying as its other blood cousin, In Utero by Nirvana; as off-putting as Lou Reed’s Berlin. Albums that reflected the huge personal crises the artists had gone – or were still going – through but which everybody else originally found impossible to listen to without wincing, or simply taking them off, infuriated that they didn’t fulfil their remit and entertain in the conventional manner.
‘It’s [about the] deep-seated anger that’s deep within our personalities,’ said Kirk. ‘We’ve been exploring our inner personalities and discovering that there’s a lot of fucking residual anger there that came from our childhoods