Metallica St. Anger CD

This CD package includes a special live DVD. The performance, filmed and recorded - as Metallica likes to say - in 'shitty 5.1 sound, balls out - features the band playing all tracks in sequence from St. Anger. The idea to create such a unique offer was hatched with typical Metallica 'aw-fuck-it-ness': "Metallica is a band that always over-delivers to their fans. This performance captures them in their most comfortable setting, in the studio where they recorded St. Anger. The band literally went into the next room, picked up their instruments and played, live, the album they had just finished recording. It captures them at their informal, raucous best."

This is a Hyper CD, which contains both regular tracks and also provides a link to the artist's website with the help of a web browser.
Metallica: James Hetfield (vocals, guitar); Kirk Hammett (guitar); Rob Trujillo (bass); Lars Ulrich (drums).
Additional personnel: Bob Rock (bass).
Recorded at HQ, San Rafael, California between May 2002 and April 2003.
"St. Anger" won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance.
This is a Hyper CD, which contains regular audio tracks and also provides a link to the artist's website with the help of a web browser.
Metallica's first new material in over five years arrived after a flurry of non-musical activity that included a much-publicized spat over Internet file sharing, the departure of bassist Jason Newsted, and a lengthy stay in rehab for James Hetfield that suspended the recording of a new album indefinitely. Hetfield returned to the fold in late 2001. Still without a bass player, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett, and their newly sober frontman recruited longtime producer Bob Rock to man Newsted's spot, and creation of the album commenced in May 2002. St. Anger arrived a year later 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. Written largely in the first person, it never warns of impending doom, doesn't struggle with claustrophobia, and has care neither for religion's safety nor its hypocrisy. (The religious symbolism of its title and artwork seems only to function as a metaphorical device.) Lacking the heavy metal baggage of these past themes, Metallica is left to ponder only itself and its singer's psychosis, and delivers its diagnosis on slabs of speed metal informed with years of innovation and texture. The record exists as it ends. As the lockstep thrash of the eight-plus minute "All Within My Hands" tumbles toward its final gasp, Hetfield is explicit in his aims. "I will only let you breathe my air that you receive," he seethes. "Then we'll see if I let you love me." Ulrich's drums sputter in fits and starts, but the guitars are already dying, shutting down as Hetfield stabs at the microphone. "Kill kill kill kill kill," he screams, and you have to check the wall for a splatter radius. It's a brutal, ugly end to an album that switches on like a bare light bulb in an underground cave. It blasts each corner with harsh, unfiltered light for 75 minutes, until the bulb is shattered with a combat boot, leaving disquieting after-images exploding on the backs of your eyelids.
"Frantic" is driven forth by a snare drum that just may be made of iron, Hammett and Hetfield's guitars eschewing separate parts in favor of a roaring tag-team approach. A hint of the band's mid-'90s nod to alternative drifts in during a bridge, but it's quickly swallowed alive by the song's muscular groove, never to be heard from again. "St. Anger," the single, marks the first appearance of a vocal technique that lurks in the shadows throughout the album. As Hetfield groans, "I feel my world shake/It's hard to see clear," he seems manipulated by an unseen force, flickering like bad reception. It's unsettling, and startlingRolling Stone (12/25/03, p.108) - Included in Rolling Stone's "50 Best Albums of 2003"
Rolling Stone (6/26/03, p.74) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...This is loud, expansive, unrepentant Metallica..."
Spin (7/03, p.109) - "...This is the album Metallica lifers have been waiting for: an inspired return to the complex savagery of old..."
Entertainment Weekly (6/13/03, pp.91-2) - "...Arguably the season's finest metal offering--and the band's best since 1991's METALLICA..." - Rating: B+
Uncut (8/03, p.106) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...An album which presents the band at their most obsessive and driven..."
Mojo (Publisher) (7/03, p.108) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...This is miffed and exemplary metal..."