Bumming around the city today, I stumbled across a book written a few years ago about Metallica. It promised to be a ‘song-by-song’ breakdown of Metallica’s entire career, and what each song means in the fabric of their career as a whole. Unfortunately, skipping through the book, I found each song’s comments to be a little bland, and taken far out of context of the album it came from, the era of the band, and the historical setting of each band member at the time. So is a song-by-song breakdown of any artists’ career actually worth reading?

When one removes a song from its context, it loses a lot of its power. The Lamb of God album ‘Ashes of the Wake’ is a complete damning of the Bush administration’s war on terror, and particular, on Iraq. Taking the song ‘Hourglass’ out of this song cycle does not remove its musical power, but it does remove the well-considered political meaning behind the album, as a whole.

While this idea seems to work best for concept albums, it still makes sense in the context of albums where the songs have no direct correlation to each other. Whilst many ‘tr00’ metalheads have a go at Korn for their perceived nu-metalness, their albums, taken as wholes, thrive in moods. Yes, while those moods are mostly derision, hopelessness, doom and anger, each song adds to the whole of the feel of the album, and so, these albums are best listened to as a complete block of music.

And while taking one song and analysing it to its logical end-point may have its good points, it really provides nothing but a single, one-dimensional perspective on the music of the band. Taking ‘St Anger’ by Metallica as an example: it has received widespread critical derision, for its terrible sound production, lack of songwriting skill, and vocal performance by James Hetfield. While these things are all valid points, these critics are removing the album from the context of the time. Anyone who has seen ‘Some Kind of Monster’ will understand, but for those who haven’t, here’s a short breakdown: the band was imploding, and nothing was working, so they hired a therapist to help them get their act together. The resulting album, St. Anger, was basically a maelstrom of noise and screaming; far different from anything Metallica had put out to that point.

This album was best viewed as a product of its time, its context and its environment. By singling out one or two songs, and damning them because of their (admittedly) sub-par musical attributes, is unfair. The same goes for song-by-song analyses of albums. They are best taken as whole entities, products of their contexts.