St. Anger - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

St. Anger received a mixed or positive response from critics; the album holds a score of 65 out of 100, based on 20 reviews, on review-aggregating website Metacritic. One reviewer, Adrien Begrand of PopMatters, took both sides, saying: "While it's an ungodly mess at times, what you hear on this album is a band playing with passion for the first time in years." Producer Bob Rock said that it was intended to sound like "a band jamming together in a garage for the first time, and the band just happened to be Metallica". Talking about the album, Greg Kot from Blender said, "It may be too late to rehabilitate Metallica's image, but once again, their music is all about bringing the carnage." Writing for NME, Ian Watson said that "the songs are a stripped back, heroically brutal reflection of this fury. You get the sense that, as with their emotional selves, they've taken metal apart and started again from scratch. There's no space wasted here, no time for petty guitar solos or downtuned bass trickery, just a focussed, relentless attack." Johnny Loftus of Allmusic praised the album and described it as a "punishing, unflinching document of internal struggle — taking listeners inside the bruised yet vital body of Metallica, but ultimately revealing the alternately torturous and defiant demons that wrestle inside Hetfield's brain. St. Anger is an immediate record." Barry Walter from Rolling Stone magazine also had a positive reaction to the direction taken in "St. Anger", stating "No wonder there's an authenticity to St. Anger's fury that none of the band's rap-metal followers can touch." He also went further to note the lack of commercial influence and modern rock aspects of previous albums, continuing; "There's no radio-size, four-minute rock here, no pop-friendly choruses, no ballads, no solos, no wayward experimentation."

Although many reviews were positive toward St. Anger, some reviewers had a strong distaste for the album. Brent DiCrescenzo from Pitchfork Media strongly disliked the album and criticized Ulrich and Hammett, saying that Ulrich was "playing a drumset consisting of steel drums, aluminum toms, programmed double kicks, and a broken church bell. The kit's high-end clamor ignored the basic principles of drumming: timekeeping," he added, "Hetfield and Hammett's guitars underwent more processing than cat food. When they both speedstrummed through 'St. Anger', and most other movements, seemed to overwhelm each other with different, terrible noise." PopMatters reporter Michael Christopher said "St. Anger dispenses with the recent spate of radio friendly pleasantries in favor of pedal to the floor thrash, staggered and extended song structures, quick changes and a muddled production that tries to harken back to the Kill 'Em All days."

In Metal Edge's 2003 Readers' Choice Awards, the album was voted in two mutually incompatible categories: Best Album Cover and Worst Album Cover. The single, St. Anger", was voted Video of the Year.