The Album Nobody Liked.

This is me reflecting on an album that came out just over seven years ago (which totally blows my mind!). The album in question is from one of my favorite bands, Metallica and it is their 2003 album St. Anger. The album came out and was of course successful if for no other reason than that it was a Metallica album and also because it was their first since 1999s' S&M. Of course after it had been out for a while, the haters came out and it soon became trendy to rip on the album and the band. I feel that I am in a minority who actually thoroughly enjoy the record. This is going to be me explaining why the album is not quite the piece of shit that everyone seems to believe it is.
Okay first things first: the main flaws that people bitch about on this record 1)the drums sound like Lars is bashing on a metal trash can, & 2) no guitar solos. For starters the drums don't sound like metal trash cans, the snare drum does. That's it. It sounds like that because the actual snare is turned off and Lars' drumsticks are in fact metal. So that's that. Secondly, yes there are no rip roaring guitar solos per say BUT if anyone cared to actually watch the film that came out documenting among other things the making of this record, Some Kind of Monster, you would have picked up the bit of dialogue where Kirk says he is "...not interested in playing traditional guitar solos anymore...". So yes he is not tearing it up but he is playing some very subtle and tastefully done "lead" parts.
Now on to the actual songs. THEY ARE GOOD!. I repeat THEY ARE GOOD!. Metallica has in fact entered into a stage where their back catalogue is so popular that most casual fans are not interested in hearing newer material, which is sad for them. Of course there is nothing on here that resembles a "hit single" but then again there was nothing of the sort on their first four albums, but they are now regarded as classics. Also this is much different than anything they had done before. Yes they are longer and have familiar song structures as previous albums, but for the first time in about 15 years they had introduced "rifforama" into the songs. Also they experimented with a new tuning. For the most part the album is tuned drop D 1 whole step down. The riffs are just as heavy as anything that they had done in quite some time, and flow very well. The only downside are some of the lyrics. This is attributed to the fact that they were being written by the band collectively. Other than that the songs ARE GOOD!
I strongly feel that people did not give this album a fare shake because of a few reasons. 1) Some people just can't give something new and different a shot. 2) Most people were not actually listening to the album themselves. They heard it was bad, therefore they thought it was bad without listening to it personally. 3) Some people are just turds who love to shit on things because it's what they do. They are so jaded (for some reason) and can't like anything. They need to find fault in everything. In this case it was the drums, no solos, the tuning, the production, the artwork, etc... Nothing is good enough for them so they just find the need to hate on it without giving it a fare shake.
Now because Metallica listens to their fans and takes their opinions into consideration, all of the tunes that they played from this album have been dropped from their set list and are not likely to make a comeback. It's a shame because in Some Kind of Monster, we were able to see the time and energy that went into crafting these tunes, and because of a few vocal turd bombs these songs have been packed away, probably for good.