I'm listening to St. Anger for the first time

[bonedish]

+1 Billy on the DM thing. I felt they returned a little to their roots.

I recall being okay with some of the song structure/riffs and even some of the melodies on St. Anger, but the drums and absence of leads by James or Kirk (I prefer James leads > Kirk) just killed it for me.

WTF was Bob Rock thinking???

[Schweezly]

The thing is...Lars wanted the snare to sound like that. Something about it sounding more raw and like an old school recording. They actually CHOOSE for it to sound that bad. And it does

[100 watt]

I am not a fan of St Anger either. but Death Magnetic is a killer fucking album, one of my favorite albums of the last decade. Flame on.

+1. I didnt think I'd like it, but after the first listen, I was glad I checked it out.

[DoubleBarrel]

: I'm listening to St. Anger for the first time

Why would you do that ?

[DNW]

I am not a fan of St Anger either. but Death Magnetic is a killer fucking album, one of my favorite albums of the last decade. Flame on.

Meh. It's certainly a big step up from St Anger, but that's not really saying much. The production is still fairly awful, and there's a lot of unnecessary rubbish in there. There are a few songs on there that could have been really good, but just aren't IMO. Either horrible lead playing just ruins the song, or the song's going along fine and then BAM... they throw in an entirely irrelevant change that goes nowhere anyway.

They really need to work with a good producer again who'll a) turn up, and b) actually say, "No, that's a terrible idea/take."

[_ej_]

Agreed, not really a fan of DM either. Its better though, I will say that.

[ovid9]

Agreed, not really a fan of DM either. Its better though, I will say that.

Yes, losing a finger is better than having your arm cut off.

DM wasn't bad but it suffered from lots of pointless riffing and pointlessly long songs. Only one song on the album is under 6 minutes, the last one. And the songs, while they have some awesome parts don't really hold up all that good as songs in my book.

I get going back to your thrash roots, that's cool, but not every song needs to be a riff endurance test.

[Elessar [Sly]]

lots of pointless riffing and pointlessly long songs.

That sums up quite a lot of their stuff to me. Riff milkage much.

[nightflameauto]

First time I heard a song from St. Anger I was like, "is this some shitty Metallica wannabe band with no recording budget?" I wasn't too far off, except for the budget part.

Death Magnetic has two strikes against it. The first time I listened to it I could literally name off the songs they were stealing either riffs or progressions from bang, bang, bang right in a row. Not all of them were from Metallica's early history. There was some Slayer and Overkill in there too.

The second strike was it sounded like when I first discovered you could use compression to push your levels, and hadn't yet discovered that there is such a thing as too fucking much. That clipping sound just gets on my ears horribly.

Song-wise/riff-wise, it's an interesting nostalgia trip so long as you don't get caught up in how much better the songs are that they were trying to rip-off. Production wise it just happened to hit one of my biggest pet peeves with modern bands. Unfortunately, that's the part I can't get past. Some of those songs have sounded alright to me in live vids where I don't have to tolerate a solid slide into clippage every time a kick or snare hits happens.

[CptCyanide]

I remember skipping class to drive out to Best Buy to pick it up on the first day it came out... that was a pretty big let down.

I think the the live studio DVD that came with the album had better production than the actual studio album