The entire point of the Some Kind of Monster documentary was to show that although the band had been playing together for twenty years, and despite the fact that Hetfield and Ulrich in particular had been best friends for even longer, they still had no idea how everyone else thought. A lot of tension within the band manifested on St. Anger, and there were some realy bizarre decisions going on, like banning guitar solos and writing as they recorded. As difficult as Some Kind of Monster was, without it, they probably wouldn't have been able to clear the air ahead of Death Magnetic, which is easily their best album since ... And Justice for All.
I can understand his reasoning, though. He didn't want Newstead going off and joining another band and then having that band's sound contaminate Metallica's future recordings. It was during the Load/ReLoad era, when Metallica was on the receiving end of a lot of criticism for dulling down their sound and going from eight-minute thrash metal epics to four-minute radio-friendly hard rock clones. I personally think a lot of the decisions made in that era weighed heavily on the band as they tried to go back to a time gone by without sounding like they were making a pastiche of their old music. They wanted to be new and old as the same time, and if Newstead had gone off and joined another band and that band's sound started corrupting Metallica's future releases, they may never have been able to go back at all. I think St. Anger is a lot like the Bond film Die Another Day: it was a bad album that we had to have to get the band to wake up to the fact that they'd lost their way, just as Die Another Day was the bad film Bond fans had to endure to get the producers to realise the series had become bloated and was crumbling under its own weight. St. Anger led to Death Magnetic, and Die Another Day let to Casino Royale, two of the best - and certainly in recent times - entries for both Metallica and James Bond. I think that, on a certain level, St. Anger can be appreciated despite its flaws. It's the sum of its parts, a testament to the ribbon of discontent running through the band at the time. There's actually some pretty good stuff on it; the title track and Frantic are respectable efforts, as raw and unpolished as they - and the rest of the album, really - are.
I do think that songwise - Death Magnetic is one of the best albums they've made for a long time. 👍
But man it sounds terrible. 👎
I struggle to listen to the whole thing in one go there's just far too much clipping & distortion going on. The first time I listened to the album I thought my speakers were broken.
You may or may not have heard of the Loudness Wars. Well this album has won it hands down, trust me this is not a good thing. There should never be another album released that is as dynamically poor as this, check out this waveform for Cyanide
The first time I saw that I thought it was a joke, but no thats exactly how they wanted it to be. Lars has even went so far as to say that there's nothing wrong with the sound at all & has tried to pin the blame on Rick Rubins shoulders. Now if there's nothing wrong with the sound why would it be the fault of someone else?
I'm not going to go off on a huge rant about this, but I do think it's a bit out of order that this album got released in this condition. So to answer the OPs question from a different, more technical perspective, I think that whichever member of the band listened to that before it got released & said "Yeah that sounds great" has lost the plot.
I think the opposite. Garcia wasn't a very good vocalist.
Most people in the world will only ever see Niagara Falls on the TV or a post card, it still beats seeing the Manchester Ship Canal in person though
