08.06.2003, 20:50
Review deo2.com
Zitat:Metallica’s album to make Cliff Burton proud
Listen, one of these soon-to-be years, albums will be made available as quickly as artists finished mixing to prevent all the ‘Net-leaks and pirating/downloading. For now, this is the reason Metallica have decided to release their album four days earlier. And, people claim there are no benefits of the Web!? C’mon, it is unimaginable that at this time of high technology wherever you look a record company needs a minimum of three months to publish a record?
‘St Anger’ is the long-anticipated return to Metal-lands and general noises we’ve learn to love from the genre’s premier band; the promise fulfilled and you can bet you last headbang! So, how did it get to be this right, such a return to form? Well, after experimental albums over the last decade, rehabs, member departure and deep soul searching, the remaining three went back to their roots, re-examined experiences and re-assembled it all in one mighty wallop of a different kind.
From the opening ‘Frantic’ the feeling is like it, hard, heavy and furious and the title track continues the attack, the brutality of pleasure committed to one’s senses. This is heavy but has a new slant of few Thrash Metal riffs, a thunderous drumming by Lars Ulrich, booming bass of the new boy, Robert Trujillo, no slow tracks and no solos. For true Metallica devotees this might be a criminal negligence: to bypass Kirk Hammett’s skills is almost sacrilegious! Instead we get all these gloriously sounding distorted guitars that nu-metallists will simply adore.
Although a rip-roaring heavy manifesto that is delivered with assurance of that baritone by James Hetfield, easily moving from harmonies to screams! ‘Dirty Window’ apparently finds him in a particularly demented state, and ‘All Within My Hands’ ends with shouts of ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ ‘St Anger’ is Metallica you’ve not encountered before, the verité XXI century edition! ‘Purify’, goes the penultimate track…
‘St Anger’ is almost a magnificent album although there, by the law of averages, had to be frail moments during its 75 minute run. (By their early standards, that’s a double album! Which, by the way, was 20 years ago.)
No idea what Jason Newsted’s problems with the other members were to make him quit but he left the best Metal band on the planet! It is a vicious fact.
8.5/10