Metallica are no strangers to recording songs which easily break the nine-minute mark: There’s …And Justice For All, To Live is to Die, Suicide Redemption, and The Outlaw Torn, not to mention their Mercyful Fate cover medley and Junior Dad from Lulu.
Without reaching for your well-worn copy of St. Anger, can you say how many songs on this 2003 release are over nine minutes? One? Two? All of them?
None. While it feels that the majority of this album’s songs belong to this pantheon of lengthy riff workouts, only closing track All Within My Hands comes within sniffing distance, clocking in at 8 minutes and 48 seconds.
This, however, didn’t stop North American YouTuber Music Dungeon taking matters into their own hands and making a series of judicial edits to their divisive album.
“This was a little project that I had started last year and kinda had sitting around for a while,” Dungeon explains. “I [decided] to upload it, since I feel this does give the album a much needed ‘trimming of the fat’.
“There’s a lot of good ideas here that are either poorly executed or just overstay their welcome (those bloated song lengths). The idea was to keep the songs intact, while getting to the point, essentially. For the most part, this works very well and makes this album less of a slog in my eyes. Is it as revelatory as I’m making it out to be? That’s for you to decide…”
Well, what do you think? Check out this fan-edit of St. Anger below:
