Once you understand what the band was going through while recording St. Anger you will somewhat appreciate the album a little more. Just remember the band rented a former army barracks back in January of 2001 turning into a makeshift studio. The band ended up postponing the recording process after bassist Jason Newsted quit the band on January 17th. They decided to include producer Bob Rock as the bassist for the upcoming album and would look to hire a new one upon completion of the record. However in July of 2001 James Hetfield ended up going to rehab for alcohol and other undisclosed addictions. Didn't return to the band until April of the next year and could only work on the album a few hours each day while he did outpatient rehab. There was a time between July 2001 and late 2002 where the band as a whole were in jeopardy of breaking up due to James going to rehab, coming out and not being able to give 100% to the group. The majority of the problem stems from Lars Ulrich wondering if James truly cared about being in the band and going forward.
As per the album James 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. [St. Anger] is just the best that it can be from us right now.". For me the problems I have with the album are below
1)Almost every single drags on a bit too long. They should have cut down the length of each song since they tend to sound repetitive
2)Lars Ulrich thinking it was a great idea to turn off the snare thus giving us the crappy tin can snare sound
3)Kirk being overruled in regards to solos thus the album having none whatsoever
4)Kirk and Lars writing lyrics, while not necessarily a bad thing in theory it just the final songs lyrically aren't that strong and it shows how both Kirk and Lars aren't the best in the lyrical department. I personally would have liked if while they did have input in the lyric department they just let James do the final writing of the lyrics.
5)The overall production quality of the album suffers because Bob Rock thought it would be great to give the production a raw, natural feel like a band recording in a garage. I mean there are some great albums that have that raw and unpolished feel to them and sadly St. Anger isn't one of them.
I however must say some songs like Frantic, The Unnamed Feeling, Some Kind Of Monster, and All Within My Hands are damn fine songs that I thoroughly enjoy