Metallica
St. Anger

Here I am reviewing an album that left me puzzled from the very first listen; "Saint Anger" is precisely that record you would never expect from a historic band like Metallica for metal, but we already know very well from the shaky "Black Album" that the direction they were taking was the wrong one. In this album, the quartet tries a genre shift; in fact, it seems they want to blend their classic "thrash," forgotten for over a decade, with a revamped style almost "Nu Metal," which certainly doesn’t belong to them. Ulrich's aggression, aided by the lowered snare drum mesh and a decidedly powerful drum mix, is not enough to mediate between an album full of utterly inadequate choruses (many Limp Bizkit-style screams), lacking a Metallica must-have (the always fantastic Hammett solos), and bass lines that may seem intricate and complex but can sound almost "random" or inappropriate to the more attentive listener.

Let's look at the songs in detail: Frantic, the best song on the album, is the classic driving Metallica start, like Battery, Blackened, Enter Sandman from the golden age; the song immediately highlights the influences under which most American bands succumb, but the riffs and drum patterns are very fitting; Saint Anger, the first single released, is the most commercial song on the album, but it's the only one along with Frantic that deserves at least one listen: a clearly Nu Metal track, with almost rapped choruses and guitar riffs worthy of the best Limp Bizkit. The track is good in the end, although it doesn't even remotely match any piece from the dear old "Master Of Puppets". Speaking of MoP, Some Kind Of Monster seems like a spit-out copy remade in Korn style, turned out in the worst way—let's skip it. I would talk about Dirty Window and Invisible Kid as a single song because they are at the same absurd level of ugliness and inconsistency, apart from some elements of Dirty Window that resemble the sound of System Of A Down, but obviously nothing special. My World is a song that, in its small way, may seem interesting, but it loses interest with a style dangling halfway between a punkish Nu Metal that completely ruins the atmosphere. Sweet Amber, in my opinion, the worst track on the entire album, although no song excels; I won't waste another word and move on, a useless and predictable song, almost harmful for those accustomed to the band’s early works. The following, The Unnamed Feeling, with an interesting although predictable start, loses all interest with the progression of time, which seems almost a weight on the song's value, already poor in itself. The penultimate, Purify, hints at something good, but the "stop and go" moments that give power to the track (incidentally, they seem to be taken wholesale from System Of A Down) do not help bring the piece to sufficiency, which bores to death already in the first minute. The final song, All Within My Hands, perhaps the most elaborate, concludes the album by giving us the idea of how the band "perhaps" intends to continue since they aren’t old enough to stop playing: riffs, vocals, drum and bass lines reminiscent of Nu Metal, repeated exhaustively and without any incisiveness; the song only comes to life with some changes that help avoid monotony, but nothing special.

Finally, you can clearly understand from my words what I think of this album, an album I absolutely do not recommend to anyone, fans included; Metallica had already marked their end with the disastrous "Load", a ruined hope that was "Reload", and a cover album, "Garage Inc.", that served no other purpose than to make a few extra bucks. Metallica is not Nu Metal, but they wanted to enter the Olympus of the commercial, and they succeeded, considering the sales. This album is truly the worst in their entire discography, and its complete anonymity speaks volumes about how the future of this band will be.