[Dayze]

Originally Posted by DaneMcCloud

St. Anger's actually a very good album in regards to the songs. Where the album ultimately fails is in the production and the producer. Bob Rock has a certain "sound" and his sound is polished, not raw.

So, in order to make the record sound more "raw", they replaced all of the drums with lo-fi samples (and in many cases, multiple samples in order to make it sound more lo-fi). They EQ'd the top end out of the guitars to make it sound like a lo-fi recording, recorded the bass, then split the signal an octave lower and added distortion and lastly, used a cheap mic to record Hetfield's vocals, then refused to tune his vocals.

The end result was very grating on the ears. But if you watch their live performance included with the movie "Some Kind of Monster", the songs sound killer and it sounds, production-wise, like the Black album.

So finally, they hired Rick Rubin to produce Death Magnetic because he's well known for raw sounding records. Personally, I think they need to hire someone like Andy Sneap for their next record to make it kick ass sonically but they have their fans to please, so it probably won't happen.

Cool. Very interesting.