There's no easy way to review 2003's St. Anger, Metallica's ninth studio album and their most divisive since 1991's Metallica. On the one hand, this was Metallica sounding revitalized, confident and aggressive; on the other, Metallica sounded confused, aimless and overindulgent. Given the unique circumstances surrounding the writing and recording of this album, as well as what Metallica intended with it, St. Anger is best reviewed from two perspectives: aesthetic and musical.

Let's start with the music. What you'll find on St. Anger is abrasive, punishing, belligerent heavy metal. The tempo rarely lets up, the drums pound and the guitar strings are shredded to dust. The title track speeds across at two hundred miles an hour, while opener "Frantic" is as sharp as a buzzsaw. "Some Kind of Monster" is appropriately titled, as the sinister intro riff explodes into a … monstrous version of the riff, over which James Hetfield spits the song's title. "Invisible Kid", "My World" and "Shoot Me Again" show Metallica pushing themselves harder, faster and further than they did on Metallica, 1996's Load or its 1997 companion ReLoad. The tempo slows, and the mood intensifies on "The Unnamed Feeling", the only song which sounds like it had more than ten minutes' worth of thought put into it. The album closes on "All Within My Hands", a juggernaut of a track that ends with Hetfield screaming the word "Kill!" over and over. Why? No one knows, and your ears are bludgeoned into submission at that point, so it's hard to care.

And that leads us to the aesthetics of St. Anger. Metallica wrote and recorded this album after their bassist of fourteen years left the band, and Hetfield literally walked away from an argument with Lars Ulrich to enter rehab. While Hetfield exorcised his demons, Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and Bob Rock faced the possibility of the Metallica machine coming to an end. Hetfield returned from rehab a different man, and St. Anger sees Metallica flex their post-therapy muscles. It's not always pretty, but from-the-heart statements are rarely articulate, or eloquent - anger management quotes were not meant to rub shoulders with zen mantras. Despite the horrendously ringing snare drum and sludgy guitars, there are many nuances to the music on St. Anger, and seeing the Some Kind of Monster documentary and reading Metallica: This Monster Lives sheds light the dark time in Metallica's history that St. Anger exorcised and purged.

St. Anger is not Metallica's best, but when the mood is right, it's really, really good. Much as I loved Load and ReLoad, those albums saw Metallica get comfortable and almost complacent on their heavy metal throne. St. Anger sees them move from the moody and introspective to the uncomfortable and unfamiliar. The result is a band that sounds alive, but very unsure of itself. Mistakes are frequently made, and this is both good and bad: the bad is that the songs are so repetitious as to sound pointless; the good is that Metallica hadn't sounded this earnest in quite a while. If the period around St. Anger was Metallica at rock bottom, the album served its purpose in helping them claw back to the top.