“A real awkward time”: the lost album that was buried by Metallica
When a band reaches a certain threshold of popularity, there comes a point where everyone in the world wants to hear what they’ve been working on. Even if it manages to be one of the worst crimes ever made against human eardrums, there’s always a chance for the diehards to eat up everything that their favourite bands offer through sheer principle. But while Metallica have been larger-than-life for half of their lives, there are many back pages that many of us have yet to see.
Then again, there aren’t too many artists willing to be as transparent as Metallica has been. Many fans insisted on calling them sellouts when The Black Album happened, but listening to their music, it’s not like they were trying to betray their fans. They simply knew they were getting bigger than anyone else, so they may as well have shot for the stars rather than making And Justice For All Part 2.
But looking through all of the events that they have done, they have never been anything less than genuine. Sure, Lars Ulrich might get on people’s nerves for being as concerned with the band’s image as he is about the music, but looking through their history, there isn’t one member of the group that isn’t thrilled to be able to talk to the fans and being as down-to-Earth as possible when talking to the people that brought them to the top.
While the band have found ways to be incredibly candid about their lives, there are more than a few times where it went over the line on Some Kind of Monster. Never has one documentary been so polarising for fans around the world, as the band welcomed film crews into their studio while they brought in a therapist and nearly broke up when James Hetfield lost his cool halfway through production.
“We didn’t go back and wade through hours and hours of Presidio stuff to try and see what could be resurrected.”
Lars Ulrich
The documentary does manage to put a somewhat happy face on a bad situation by watching them return to form at the end, but that’s ignoring the fact that St Anger was a pain to listen to. From back to front, the whole album reads like a huge piece of emotional vomit, and while they probably needed to let that aggression out on record, they had enough sense to realise when some parts of the record weren’t working.
The band had spent a considerable amount of time working at the makeshift studio Presidio before moving into Studio HQ, but Ulrich said that most of the material they worked on in the first studio is never going to see the light of day, saying, “There’s certainly no plans [to release it] right now. The Presidio was a real awkward time as we were kind of getting our feet wet again. [On Death Magnetic], we didn’t go back and wade through hours and hours of Presidio stuff to try and see what could be resurrected.”
While the documentary hinted at some extended jams, like the song ‘Temptation’, it’s probably for the best that they didn’t release some of them. This was before Hetfield was on the road to recovery, and since some of the tracks that survived include the song ‘Some Kind of Monster’, it’s highly likely that those songs are nothing more than a few spare riffs and rough sketches of songs.
Although some of the ideas may have made for a better record than what St Anger became, what we ended up with is probably the ideal way of hearing Metallica’s worst era. Most people would have been satisfied if they had never listened to the record again, but had it not been able to come out, we may not have Metallica at all.
