St. Anger is the eighth studio album by American heavy metal band Metallica, released on June 5, 2003 through Elektra Records. Not only was it the band's first album of the 21st century, but it was the band's last album released through Elektra, thus marking the end of the longest timespan between studio albums from Metallica, with nearly six years between the release of ReLoad and this album. St. Anger was originally intended for release on June 10, 2003, but was released five days earlier due to concerns over unlicensed distribution through peer-to-peer file sharing networks. The album marks the final collaboration between Metallica and producer Bob Rock, whose relationship began with the band's fifth studio album, 1991's Metallica.

St. Anger is the first Metallica album since Master of Puppets that does not feature long-time bassist Jason Newsted. Newsted left the band prior to the initial sessions for the album, leaving Rock to temporarily take his place until a permanent replacement could be found. It is also the first album since ...And Justice for All to have a title track. Recording of the album initially started on April 24, 2001, but was postponed indefinitely when rhythm guitarist and singer James Hetfield entered rehab for "alcoholism and other addictions". St. Anger is often recognized for being a radical musical departure from Metallica's earlier work; it features a heavy metal style, raw production, and no guitar solos. It is also the first and only album by Metallica to be recorded as a three piece band instead of four.

St. Anger debuted at the top of sales charts in 30 countries, including the US Billboard 200. Upon its release, it met mixed critical reviews and has since gained less favorable reception. In 2004, the album's lead single, "St. Anger", won a Grammy Award for "Best Metal Performance". The album was certified 2x platinum by the RIAA^[8] and has sold over 6 million copies worldwide.^[9]

Background, writing and recording[link]

Metallica rented an old army barracks on the Presidio of San Francisco, California and converted it into a makeshift studio in January 2001.^[10] As plans were being made to enter the studio to write and record its first album in nearly five years, Metallica postponed the recording due to the departure of Jason Newsted. Newsted left Metallica on January 17, 2001, stating his departure was due to "private and personal reasons and the physical damage I have done to myself over the years while playing the music that I love".^[11] Uncomfortable with immediately writing and recording with a new bassist, Metallica opted to include Bob Rock as bassist. The band stated they would find another bass player upon the album's completion.^[10]

In July 2001, recording came to a halt when James Hetfield entered rehab for alcoholism and other undisclosed addictions.^[12] Hetfield returned to the band in April of the next year,^[13] but was only allowed to work on the album from 12:00 to 4:00 PM. Due to his personal dilemmas, as well as Metallica's internal struggles, the band hired a personal enhancement coach, Phil Towle, to help them. This and the recording of the album was documented by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. Throughout two years of filming, over 1,000 hours of video were recorded, documenting the band's recording process. Subsequent to the album's release, Berlinger and Sinofsky released the edited material as the film Some Kind of Monster.^[14]

Hetfield stated that the album was written with "a lot of passion in this".^[15] He said, "There's two years of condensed emotion in this. We've gone through a lot of personal changes, struggles, epiphanies, it's deep. It's so deep lyrically and musically.^[15] [St. Anger] is just the best that it can be from us right now."^[16] The band purposely wanted a raw sound on the album; therefore Rock did not polish the sound while mixing. The band desired the raw sound because of the depth of the emotion they felt and did not want to "mess with it".^[16] Rock commented, "I wanted to do something to shake up radio and the way everything else sounds. To me, this album sounds like four guys in a garage getting together and writing rock songs. There was really no time to get amazing performances out of James. We liked the raw performances. And we didn't do what everyone does and what I've been guilty of for a long time, which is tuning vocals. We just did it, boom, and that was it."^[17]

Guitarist Kirk Hammett commented on the lack of guitar solos on St. Anger, a departure from what Metallica has done in the past: "We wanted to preserve the sound of all four of us in a room just jamming. We tried to put guitar solos on, but we kept on running into this problem. It really sounded like an afterthought." Hammett said that he was happy with the final product.^[18] Rock stated, "We made a promise to ourselves that we'd only keep stuff that had integrity. We didn't want to make a theatrical statement by adding overdubs."^[17]

Robert Trujillo became Metallica's new bassist in February 2003 and toured with the band in support of St. Anger.

Drummer Lars Ulrich achieved a unique sound on St. Anger by turning off the snares on his snare drum resulting in a drum tone with far more "ring" than is usual in rock and metal. This sound received much backlash from fans and critics alike.^[19] Ulrich said, "One day I forgot to turn the snare on because I wasn't thinking about this stuff. At the playbacks, I decided I was really liking what I was hearing — it had a different ambience. It sang back to me in a beautiful way." Regarding the backlash about the sound, he stated, "It's crazy, that kind of closed-mindedness."^[19] Rock said, "I would say I've only [done something] this brutal [sounding] when I've done demos. It probably sounds heavier because it's Metallica, but really this was a 15-minutes-on-the-drum-sound type of thing."^[20]

When St. Anger was completed, Metallica kept true to its earlier statement and hired a new permanent bassist. In February 2003, Robert Trujillo joined the band. Trujillo appeared on the footage of studio rehearsals of St. Anger in its entirety, which was included on DVD in the album package.^[10]

Album artwork[link]

Brian "Pushead" Schroeder designed the album cover and interior artwork for St. Anger. Pushead has designed a number of items for Metallica in the past, including liner artwork of ...And Justice for All, several single covers, and many T-shirts; however, the album marks his first studio album cover art for the band. Originally, according to Metallica's official website, four different limited color variations of the cover were planned, but the idea was eventually scrapped.^[21]

Release and promotion[link]

St. Anger was released on June 5, 2003. It was originally scheduled for June 10, but due to Metallica's previous battle with Napster and fear that it would be illegally released onto peer-to-peer file sharing networks, the band pushed the release date five days ahead.^[22][23] A special edition of the album was released with a bonus DVD, featuring live, in-the-studio rehearsals of all of the St. Anger tracks. First week sales of the album were 417,000 copies,^[24] and it debuted at #1 on the US Billboard 200, as well as 30 other countries in the world.^[25] In 2004, Metallica won the award for Best Metal Performance, for the title track.^[26]

Metallica playing live, in support of St. Anger.

After St. Anger's release, Metallica embarked on a tour that would last nearly two years. The first leg was the US 2003 Summer Sanitarium tour with support from Limp Bizkit, Deftones, Linkin Park, and Mudvayne. After Summer Sanitarium, the band began the Madly in Anger with the World Tour with support from Godsmack (and Slipknot on certain European dates), which lasted until late 2004. The St. Anger songs "Frantic", "St. Anger", "Dirty Window" and "The Unnamed Feeling" were performed frequently during the tour. "Sweet Amber" and "Some Kind of Monster" were also played live, but not as often as other songs on the album.^[27] The album tracks were altered when played live; sometimes they were shortened, or in some cases a guitar solo was added.^[28] Sometimes, only one song from the album was played live. By 2009, the songs from St. Anger were completely absent from Metallica's set lists. The last time any song was performed from the album on a major tour was "Frantic" on October 21, 2008 in Glendale, Arizona,^[27] although "Dirty Window" and "Frantic" were performed again on December 10, 2011 during the last concert of Metallica's special and private 30th Anniversary Tour, in San Francisco, California. In October 2007, "All Within My Hands" was performed live for the first time, acoustically, at both nights of the Bridge School Benefit concerts.

Metallica also released four singles from St. Anger. The order of the releases was "St. Anger", "Frantic", "The Unnamed Feeling" and "Some Kind of Monster". On the US Mainstream Rock chart, these singles charted at #2, #21, #28 and #18, respectively.^[29] Promotional music videos were also made of all four of the songs. These videos can be found on Metallica's DVD video collection, titled The Videos 1989-2004, and the video for "Some Kind of Monster" can also be found on the film Some Kind of Monster.

Critical reception[link]

Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	65/100[30]
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]
Blender	[31]
Entertainment Weekly	B+[32]
IGN	7/10[33]
NME	9/10[2]
Pitchfork Media	0.8/10[34]
Rolling Stone	[35]
Spin	8/10[36]
Uncut	[37]

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.^[30] 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."^[38] 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".^[10] 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."^[39] 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."^[2] 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."^[1] 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."^[35]

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, [Hetfield and Hammett] seemed to overwhelm each other with different, terrible noise."^[40] 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."^[41]

Track listing[link]

All songs written and composed by James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Bob Rock. 

Personnel[link]

Metallica

• Lars Ulrich – drums
• James Hetfield – guitar, lead vocals
• Kirk Hammett – guitar, backing vocals

Additional musicians

• Bob Rock – bass guitar
• Robert Trujillo – bass guitar (credited as band member and performs on included "St. Anger Rehearsals" DVD, but does not perform on album)

Production

• Produced by Bob Rock and Metallica
• Engineered and mixed by Bob Rock, assisted by Mike Gillies and Eric Helmkamp
• Digital engineering by Mike Gillies
• Mastered by Vlado Meller
• Album design by Metallica
• Cover illustrations by Pushead
• Photography by Anton Corbijn
• Production design by Brad Klausen
• St. Anger illustration, James image and Kirk image by Matt Mahurin
• Lars image by Forhelvede Productions
• Robert image by Pascal Brun and Comenius Röthlisberger
• Management by Q Prime Inc.

[edit] St. Anger Rehearsals DVD

• Directed by Wayne Isham
• Produced by Dana Marshall
• Edited by Greg Rodgers and Gary Rodgers
• Cinematography by Alex Poppas
• Cameras by Jean Pellerin, Mike Hatchet, Dave Hatchet, Colin Mitchell, Ryan Smith, and Nick Pectol
• Gaffer - Logan Lebo
• Monitors by Paul Owen
• Production manager - Scott Cunningham
• Script supervisor - Connie Isham
• Additional editing by Jean Pellerin and Tracy Loth, assisted by Jason Bridges

Chart positions[link]

Certifications[link]

References[link]

Patti Stanger
Patti Stanger at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books 2009
Born	(1961-05-31) May 31, 1961 (age 51) Short Hills, New Jersey, USA
Nationality	American
Education	University of Miami
Occupation	Reality Television producer Reality Television personality
Years active	2002–present
Known for	Millionaire Matchmaker

Patti Stanger (born May 31, 1961) is a Jewish-American matchmaker and television producer with her own Bravo TV show called The Millionaire Matchmaker. She is the founder and CEO of Millionaire's Club International Inc., a professional matchmaking service for millionaires.

Early life and education[link]

Adopted into a Jewish family,^[1] Patti Stanger grew up in Short Hills, New Jersey and graduated from Millburn High School.^[2] She now lives in Los Angeles, CA.^[3] She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Miami in 1983.

Career[link]

Early career[link]

Prior to founding her business, Stanger worked as the Director of Marketing for Great Expectations. Stanger is a third-generation matchmaker. Stanger was introduced to the fashion industry by Janis Spindel, who had hired and scouted her at the age of 24 when looking to cast a part for a sitcom pilot.^[4] She worked for ten years in the fashion industry at Unionbay Sportswear, JouJou Jeans, and Saks Fifth Avenue.^[5]

Millionaire's Club[link]

In 2000, Stanger stated that "successful men in the dating arena needed a private, exclusive club where they could come to find their beautiful and intelligent wives."

[edit] Millionaire Matchmaker

In 2008, Stanger signed a deal to have her own reality show called Millionaire Matchmaker on the Bravo TV Network. Stanger stars in the program and also produces the show.^[6]

The hour-long show follows her matchmaking at Millionaire's Club. Each episode features her matchmaking two millionaires. First they submit a biographical sketch on a DVD describing the type of partner they want. Stanger then meets them individually to better understand their desires and welcome them to the club. She's been called "The Simon Cowell of Dating,"^[7] and makes very quick, very direct comments. "I am not paid to hide my true feelings," she said. Her "casting calls" or "recruiting sessions" where she screens women can be brutal. She told one woman she had a beautiful face but could not meet her millionaire because she was 10–15 lbs overweight. "I can't do much for women over 45," Stanger said in an interview, "and if they're overweight, it's almost impossible."^[8] She told another woman to take off her wig, then suggested she come back after she got hair extensions.

The millionaires and 30–40 women first meet at a cocktail party she hosts called a "VIP mixer," where they mingle and the millionaires get to evaluate the women. The men choose their top two women and have ten-minute "mini dates," then they pick the one that they like best. Stanger announces the choices to the group, and then the millionaires set up their "master dates."

The Millionaire's Club has a few rules. For example, millionaires cannot discuss sex or trade phone numbers at the mixer. No sex is allowed until the couple is in an "exclusive, committed, monogamous relationship." There is also a two-drink maximum enforced on each date. If a millionaire violates the terms of the club, then Patti can throw them out of the club.

At the end of each episode, Stanger calls each millionaire or invites them into her office to discuss how the date went; this is after she calls the person they chose for their master date.

The show concludes with updates on each couple, saying whether they are still together or not.

Radio[link]

In April 2009, Patti Stanger was hired by Clear Channel subsidiary Premiere Radio Networks to host a 4-week special titled P.S. I Love You for XM Satellite Radio.^[9] The live call-in program was simulcast on Clear Channel owned MIX channel 22 and The Pink Channel on channel 24 Sunday evenings. After a month hiatus, the program was returned to the schedule on a semi-regular basis, until it was moved to Thursday evenings in July 2009 and made a permanent fixture.^[10] Stanger continues to host P.S. I Love You on Thursday nights from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific time on both Mix and The Pink Channel.

Personal life[link]

In 2003, Stanger started dating Andy Friedman, a real-estate executive whom she met through a matchmaker.^[11] On July 22, 2009, Lalate.com announced that Andy proposed to Patti Stanger on May 31, her birthday. They did not agree on a date for the wedding, although episodes of season three of The Millionaire Matchmaker showed Stanger engaged in wedding planning activities and she spoke openly to the media about details of the wedding.^[12]

On August 14, 2010, Stanger announced via Twitter^[13] that she was ending her relationship with Friedman, stating, "I just ended my relationship with Andy. It hit me really hard that I want kids in my life. You have to agree on the non-negotiables." She has also stated in the season 5 finale of "Millionaire Matchmaker" that Friedman was like a "best friend" to her and that passion was lacking in their relationship.

After she was matched on her own show, she started seeing John Matthews, the man she picked^[14]. In the Millionaire Matchmaker Reunion show however, she stated that the two of them were just friends.

Stanger's first book on dating was published in 2009. It is entitled Become Your Own Matchmaker: 8 Easy Steps for Attracting Your Perfect Mate.^[15]

In February 2012, she was one of a group of celebrities that walked down a catwalk in red dresses for the 'Heart Truth Red Dress Collection' show, part of New York Fashion Week. She wore a Marc Bouwer dress. ^[16]

2011 Television comments[link]

On September 25, 2011, during a taping of "Watch What Happens Live" hosted by Andy Cohen, Stanger made some remarks that many found controversial. When responding to a question from a gay man about a long distance open-relationship, she said, "There is no curbing you people," meaning that gay men are incapable of monogamy. She later told a viewer who Skyped in, "You are very handsome, I thought you were straight." She went on to explain that she meant he was not "queen-y." Stanger also made comments about Jewish men and smart women that were found to be offensive.^{[by whom?][17]}

These comments quickly drew many angry responses on Twitter. Bravo and Stanger issued apologies with Stanger tweeting, "I am so sorry. I did not mean to offend anyone with my comments last night on Watch What Happens Live.”^[18]

Television work[link]

• Millionaire Matchmaker (2008– Present)
• Drop Dead Diva - Marcie LaRose (2011) 1 Episode
• Days of Our Lives - Herself (2011) 1 Episode

References[link]

External links[link]

• Patti Stanger at the Internet Movie Database
• Patti Stanger's Bio from Bravotv.com
• Millionaire's Club Website
• "Millionaire Matchmaker" Is the New Heidi Fleiss (TMZ.com)
• Interview with Patti on Reality TV World