Metallica: is St Anger going to sort them out at last?

"The mentions of Sepultura and Pantera parallels seem to suggest it may just be a belated attempt to catch up with mid-90s metal trends"
Hmm, that sounds like a really bad idea. Pantera were always horrid, and Sepultura pretty much blew it after Arise.
I suspect Metallica'll keep experimenting with various things now, not bother so much with the metal. I have a hard time imagining them going back to thrash.

People definitely need to give up already on any hope of the band returning to such things. Go buy some of those Coroner reissues instead, those guys were better than Metallica could ever have dreamt of.

Two things tho:

1. You gotta love Justice. Coke-metal. What a combo.

2. "Pantera were always horrid." Don't be silly. Please listen closely to 'Cowboys' and 'Vulgar' and realise quite quickly the skills. That guitar at the start of 'Cowboys From Hell' - Je-sus. The vocal and guitar harmonics on 'Cemetary Gates'. The biggest riff ever writen on 'By Demons Be Driven.' The stoopid deep vocals on 'No Good (Attack the Radical).' For a time - Pantera was everything.

< rant >And don't get me started on Pantera. Their HC/metal crossover was probably the worst thing that ever happened to metal and directly responsible for the terrible, terrible Biohazard/Machine Head/Slipknot moshcore trend. Directly ripping off their fellow Texans Exhorder, after their hair metal albums didn't sell - I still have a fair amount of respect for Metallica, but Pantera were always such obvious bandwagon jumping posers. Everything about them is just laughable, the lyrics, the solos, the pedestrian riffs, the extremely silly 'angry' vocals...and their fanbase makes it even worse. I'm very, very glad they've disappeared from the critics' radar since Far Beyond Driven (notable for the absence of a single memorable riff). < /rant >

this is the most correct thing i've seen on ILM today.

(although pointing out that pantera is just a watered down version of exhorder comes in a close second.)

And Far Beyond Driven had 'I'm Broken' on it - to my mind a hugely memorable riff. The rest of it was shite though.

Otherwise you're on the proverbial money completely, Siegbran. And even though I can totally agree with your point about the repetitive (and frankly pointless) nature of the Justice-period epics, I still like 'em!

You'll probably be apoplectic with rage to hear that the journalist who was reporting on these 5 preview tracks from the new metallica album did indeed compare them to Roots period Sepultura!

My favorites are the middle ones, "No More Color" and "Mental Vortex" where they're still thrashy, but manage to mix it up with some odd meters and general killer songwriting. In my opinion you can't go wrong with the band though, but a lot of metalheads dislike "Grin" for straying a bit too far. There's also a self titled album, which was released on their break-up, which was about half and half a "best of" compilation, and new songs. And the new songs are soooo good! Quite depressing that poor Tommy T should go to Kreator after that, and then just give up on the bandthing altogether.
That guy's one of my absolute favorite guitarists in metal, as he had a great knack for riffs AND soloing. Not often I find metalguitarists who actually write intriguing and fitting solos. Combine that with some of the finest riffs around, and you've got yourself quite a jolly experience.

If you're more for the pure thrash attack, try Punishment For Decadence, or the debut: R.I.P.

Roger Fascist said:
Please listen closely to 'Cowboys' and 'Vulgar' and realise quite quickly the skills. That guitar at the start of 'Cowboys From Hell' - Je-sus.

I've heard these albums many times. Now, "Dimebag" is a fair guitarist, I agree, and Cowboys does have some pretty good riffs strewn about it. I still find it to be a very mediocre record, at times even bordering on godawful.
I'm admittedly not a big Exhorder fan either, though it's been years since I've heard "Slaughter In The Vatican"

And about the Sepultura thing...Metallica have disappointed so many times that this is not something to be angry about about anymore.

They don't write 'em like that anymore!

(and probably couldn't if they wanted to)

(I've gotta stop hitting "submit" prematurely)

But, as Siegbran sagely observed, Metallica's capacity to disappoint over the last decade or so has proved near limitless...

- haha, Newsted is really nowhere to be heard!
- the solo in Eye Of The Beholder is very Iron Maiden
- it's indeed as much an incoherent riff salad as I remembered. Some of the transitions don't make sense at all!
- "Blackened" starts out great, up to and including the "Fire...to begin with the dance of the dead" chorus, and then gets completely bogged down in tons of senseless riffs and tempo changes
- the drum patterns are sooo predictable...
- ...and the less said about the lyrics, the better
- I was right in picking "Harvester Of Sorrow" for the POX list, it's the only song with any noticable structure and the solo is cool
- they really WERE bad at the very fast songs, "Dyers Eve" is terrible.
- just played "To Live Is To Die" and Enslaved's "Norvegr" back to back, two similar repetitive instrumental epics and the difference is immense...the Metallica song runs around in circles and has to be 'rescued' by finally blending it into "Dyers Eve", while Enslaved builds up this majestic cadence in which bass, drums, acoustic guitar, piano and electric guitar playfully take turns in developing and accenting the main theme...lovely.

They did a good job of keeping it under wraps, but it finally showed up on p2p a little bit before the release date (6/10).

The speed's back, and the sinister-sounding structures are too. The problem I picked up on immediately, though, is that it sounds like they're playing catch-up to a hundred other bands. Stick Hetfield's vocals over a System of a Down track, and that's what St. Anger sounds like. Even when they were pounding away on songs like "Battery" or "For Whom the Bell Tolls" in the 80s, they wanted to be bigger and better than their peers, and kept going until they were. Now that they're on top of the mountain, they've taken the opportunity to get sloppy and lazy. Not the way they did in the 90s. Back then, they were still looking for something else. Less aggression? More melody? Yeah, all of that. But now, they're trying to "fit in" again...and it's really sad. St. Anger isn't the sound of a band pushing itself. It's the sound of a band being pushed.

Well, very good anyway.

I did, however, hear one new Metallica song, which was definitely Metallica. It also happened to be the TITLE TRACK! Wow! What luck! This song sucked the most shit I've heard in a long time and way more than I had expected. Oh my god, it was a tragedy and I really had to force myself to listen to it straight through without skipping ahead.

"Madly in anger with you" ?? Is that for real? That's retarded, especially when repeated over and over.

It's strange but the style Metallica started with masked their inability to write decent songs and actually somehow made them seem like brilliant musicians. Change the style a little bit and it becomes obvious what piecemeal musical clowns they really are. Everything from "...And Justice For All" onward has completely changed the way I hear their older, "better" tunes. Maybe something about maturing has changed the way I hear it as well, but Master of Puppets and Ride The Lightning sound terrible to me now, almost like musical paint-by-numbers. Maybe they realized this themselves when they decided to go for more of a "groovey blues feel" with the black album, but that just proved they suck even more.

Bah. How could I have possibly considered this band so far superior to even the likes of Motley Crue back then? Give me the Crue's worst album (difficult to pinpoint for sure) over any Metallica any day. At least it'll be sort of fun to listen to.

I might have suggested Theatre of Pain, but it's hard to think of an album less worth listening to than Generation Swine.....apart from maybe New Tattoo.

(of course it's ironic that they spent god knows how much money on Bob Rock to sound "raw". or maybe it isn't on second thought.)

they'e been playing live on M2 at Rock am ring for about an hour or something and haven't played ANY nineties metallica.

Not only that, the old material actually sounds like the old material! For years they had this annoying tendency to play all their old songs in a Load/Black Album "rock" mode, shortening the songs and speeding up/slowing down the parts that didn't fit their current sound.

UNVEILED! FOR THE FIRST TIME ANYWHERE!
THE ULRICH METHOD!

Step 1: Put Microphone in Shoebox
Step 2: Put Shoebox in bathtub
Step 3: bounce handfuls of Superballs(TM) against shoebox
Step 4: Take recorded results, run it through Pro-Tools and fuck it up
Step 5: When it sounds like a loose ball bearing in either a garbage disposal or a cuisanart, randomly splice between "garbage disposal" and "cuisinart bits"
Step 6: Hire a session bassist who will work for cheap.
Step 7: Don't let session bassist remain audible in mix.
Step 8: Have James take 10 minutes out of his busy schedule to write a few pages of vague lyrics about Corruption, Death and Cthulhu.
Step 9: Copy the results onto the kinds of low bias audiotape you get 6 for a Dollar from Walmart. Mail this mess to your record label.
Step 10: Tequila! Tequila! Tequila!

But yours makes more sense.

OH SNAP, I just remembered that my buddy bought me their comp album on cassette the following christmas. Nothing better than Vince Neil trying to to Robin Zander trying to do Johnny Rotten...

Hahahahahahahaha

So OTM it hurts. Many brilliant metal bands work(ed) with the concept of focusing on improvised, organic structuring and deliberately lo-fi aesthetics: Ildjarn, Erasmus, Esoteric, Raven (the Norse one), the Legions Noires bands, but these tended to adapt their entire approach to this ideal, while Metallica/Rock seems to have lacked the vision/flexibility to take that extra step of deconstructing the music on a deeper level. With the result that it sounds exactly like what it is: a heap of badly structured moshcore riffs.

On the other hand, it IS a rather bold step for such a mainstream band. I'm sure label execs have had serious doubts whether this would appeal to the market of overproduced/neutered angstrock a la Linkin Park/Evanescence (although the question is whether the demographics overlap THAT much, in the sense that the average Metallica fan is not 13). I'm fairly sure that the inclusion of those tried-and-tested-in-the-90s percussive mosh-riffs/rhythms were what got them on board in the end.

In fact, it's almost like they made a weird sounding record to amuse themselves (or Bob Rock), and are saying, "If you want to hear the "finished" versions of these songs, come to our shows." Leave it to Metallica to come up with the post-Napster business plan industry couldn't.

I was talking to a 13 year old kid today who plays guitar and i asked him what he thought of the new Metallica single. "Oh yeah, it's great". I said,really,you think so? He said,"No!"(he was kidding)"It sounds like a bad linkin park b-side".His favorite current album:The new Lightning Bolt! He also can't wait to go to the upcoming Opeth show.(I did have to tell him who Porcupine Tree were and why he would like seeing them with Opeth-these kids don't know everything!) Staind came on the radio and i said, THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD BE LISTENING TO!! NOT LIGHTNING BOLT! He just rolled his eyes. see, there's hope for the future.

um, i just meant the kids with the chops to play that tricky zappa shit. Paul Green is unfortunately a big Zappa fan. He even had the kids play before a show that featured some zappa alumni band.
and the kid i was talking to is really into the tricky/quirky stuff like mr.bungle and the like. i always tell him to buy stuff like neurosis and mastodon cuz i am a corruptor of youth.
Siegbran, i know you think opeth are overrated and everything, but have you never liked ANYTHING they have done? anything? i dig 'em and have no problem with them being overrated and i like the new Floyd-ish album a lot too. but that's just me.

How is this more of a disappointment than the previous four albums?

All Within My Hands is about jerking it right

I just posted about this very recently, but at my college I used to hang in a building called Stanger; I’m not even making that up.

YOU FLUSH IT OUT

did we ever get this sorted

surely some kind of monster is the enduring cultural artifact of this era

Skom is one of the best movies ever made

otm

saw it for the first time the other night, loved it.

Anyone else heard Jim Breuer Lars impression? It's pretty funny.

I like the scene where Lars wonders if Jason's new band ECHOBRAIN is going to be the next big thing. (It was not.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3m6RM_PTLg

^ I just listened to this again, and yeah, still pretty funny and really underscores that no surprise, Lars is a total dick.