“Annoying”: Metallica’s biggest regret about ‘St. Anger’
You could write a Brechtian farce about the relationship Metallica had with production. A defiantly uncommercial thrash metal band whose repeated attempts to fire a bazooka at their own feet instead propelled them into being the biggest rock band in the world. It is worth remembering Metallica weren’t just big for a metal band; they were enormous by any metric, no matter how many of their records sounded like deep-fried bollocks.
Not just in the traditional way that most early metal albums do, either. Sure, their early records sound like they were recorded onto tinfoil through a series of ghosts, but that was just alternative music in the early 1980s. And Lars Ulrich would surely learn to actually drum sooner or later, right? The shocking thing is how even when they moved into the mainstream, they were still trying their damndest to royally screw themselves over.
By 1988, the only thing that Metallica loved more than booze was bullying bassist Jason Newsted. Original bassist Cliff Burton had tragically died two years earlier, and the rest of the band’s peculiar way of grieving him was to make the legitimately talented Newsted’s life an absolute misery.
They trashed his hotel rooms, spread damaging rumours about him and charged bar tabs that matched the GDPs of multiple countries to his account. Worst of all, when mixing their first masterpiece, …And Justice For All, they made sure his phenomenal bass work was literally inaudible. Ulrich and Hetfield’s brutal hazing regime made one of the best metal albums ever sound like a distorted MIDI cover of itself. And not in a cool Death Grips way, either.
Maybe they were just trying to cajole Newsted into pulling his weight. All he contributed to the record was writing the main riff to fucking ‘Blackened’. Newsted’s treatment led to mixer Steve Thompson trying to quit on the spot, but because karma is dead and Lars Ulrich killed it, the album broke Metallica into the mainstream. ‘One’, the title track and the aforementioned ‘Blackened’ became some of the most iconic tracks in the history of heavy metal.
Of course, in 1991, they released The Black Album, which still sounds exceptional thanks to producer Bob Rock being even more of a domineering dictator than Jim ’n’ Lars. The band would spend the ’90s seemingly on top of the world, having transcended the metal world entirely and settled on a U2-esque touring schedule of stadium-slaying world tours and top ten hits on the singles charts. All within the Metallica camp was not well though.
While Ulrich and Hetfield had spent the late 1980s going full Biff Tannen on Newsted, their legendarily bad attitudes had started to rub off on each other and the entire rest of the band by the late ’90s. The legitimately monk-like patience of Newsted finally cracked in 2001 when they reconvened to make their next album, and he left the band in a cloud. Thus, the band set off on the rocky, dangerous and humiliating path that would lead them to arguably the worst album of their career.
Hetfield was off next for a long overdue stay in rehab due to his addiction to alcohol (and chocolate, allegedly). When he returned, the band did one very smart thing and one very stupid thing. The former was to hire a performance coach, basically a group therapist to help the band work through their differences and their now very conflicting lifestyles. Good for them! The latter was to make a warts and all documentary depicting the entire process. Oh no.
This firestorm of bad vibes led to the legendary misfire of St. Anger. A primal scream of a record in all the worst ways. 75 human minutes of guttural, hookless churn that aims for the raw, ruthless aggression of their early work but lands on, essentially, nu-metal without the hip-hop. Just endless thrashing and crunching with Hetfield sounding worse than he’s ever done on record, and what the shivering fuck is going on with that snare?!
Here comes the bit that you’ve been waiting for if you know St. Anger. Legendarily poor drummer Lars Ulrich decided that if he was going to match the violence and edge that the rest of the band were going for, it certainly wasn’t going to be via his technical ability. Instead, he just tuned his snare up as tight as it would go until it sounded like he was thwacking a frying pan and used that for the entire record.
Thus, the record sounds like a production of Stomp from the pits of hell itself. A sound so bad that the producer of …And Justice For All itself, Fleming Rasmussen, deemed it “fucking annoying as hell” in an interview with Daniel Sarkissian. That man knows all about the um “quirks” of working with Metallica, and even he couldn’t stomach it. Figures.
