Metallica – St. Anger

Double 180 Gram Heavyweight Vinyl. Never underestimate the regenerative powers of Metallica. Following the stripped-down ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’, they’ve returned to the raw, vitriolic savagery of their earlier canon, using 1984’s ‘Ride the Lightning’ as a template for ‘St. Anger’. The title track provides the psychic lynchpin of the album by combining the bombast and defiance of the band’s earliest high-water marks with more deliberate lyrics and emotional nakedness. Equally cathartic is ‘Some Kind of Monster,’ a lumbering beast of a song that declares, “This is the voice of silence no more.” Despite that claim, there’s an economy to these lyrics; James Hetfield’s raw-toothed growl only occasionally punctuates the menacing soundscapes. In fact, ‘Dirty Windows,’ the standout track here, is a shimmering five-minute instrumental that’s free of the baroque trappings that sometimes clutter the Metallica landscape.

2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Gatefold