All of the foregoing is to make the point that, despite its legendary status as one of the worst sounding major label albums ever made, St. Anger is not actually the worst sounding thing I've ever heard. I can easily pull a hundred examples of major label releases from my music collection that sound objectively worse. The thing is, those examples date back to the pre-microphone era, pre-1925, when recordings were made in a room with a group of singers and/or players performing into a large metal horn and the resulting recordings had the dynamic range of something listened to through an old school analog telephone. Judged in the context of when it was made, St. Anger ranks as one of the worst sounding major label albums I've ever owned, and it's due entirely to the absolutely unlistenable ringing tin pot snare drum and the muddy sound of the guitars. The production is downright abysmal, and it's all the more stupefying given the stature of the band and its producer, Bob Rock. What were they thinking?!! is an absolutely legitimate question to ask.

Metallica seems to have a predilection for production misfires in their catalog. There was And Justice For All... in 1988, with its horrible drum sound and nonexistent bass, which has inspired innumerable YouTube videos adding amped up bass re-recordings by fans. Then there was 2008's Death Magnetic, legendary for its extreme compression and very noticeable audio distortion, which has itself inspired multiple YouTube videos and fan made remixes using the stems from the Guitar Hero video game. And so it is with St. Anger, an effort intended to recapture the raw, unpolished aggression of the band's hungrier days, but which succeeds mostly in presenting a struggling band beset by numerous personal and interpersonal issues in as poor a light as possible. So just for fun, I'm going to compare Metallica's eighth studio album with the most popular fan re-recording on YouTube.