Soooo… the release of the much anticipated new Metallica album, St. Anger is imminent. We have been waiting literally months for this one, haven’t we? Nice ploy by the boys though, inn’t? Especially since the last couple of efforts, I refer to Load and Reload, didn’t exactly meet expectations, did they?

I read a review in Total Guitar magazine way back in August 1996, at the time of the Load release, where the writer was gushing about how experimental the album was, and how certain members of the band had been known to have both country and blues “leanings” for “sometime”.

Ok, Total Guitar were obviously more interested in Metallica’s guitar work, rather than their “orientation”, but the sentence did say a lot about the boys new “direction”. It would seem the rest of us were not so taken by this “experimentation” though.

So back to the suspiciously extended gestation period of St. Anger. How many rumours have we heard about this new release? We’ve all heard how “hard core” and “back to basics” it will be. Dark, hard, and fast, in fact.

St. Anger has been festering, and carefully cultivated at that, in our collective conscious to the point of, well, release, if you will excuse my crudeness. Apparently work was completed last year, so why wait this long for the release? Yeah…

In short, all the band driven media hype has gotten me so excited, that yes, at midnight on the appointed day, I’ll be down at Central Station Records… er, which I am sure will be part of the late night fun?!?