Todd In The Shadows Thread

Sturgill Simpson released "Sound & Fury" accompanied by a Netflix anime film (WARNING - NSFW DUE TO TITS):

And before Daft Punk we also had Pink Floyd adapt The Wall into a 1982 live-action/animated hybrid film

Edited by Pachylad on Mar 22nd 2021 at 11:03:30 PM

Huh, neat. It's still not a common thing.

What, just mentionning Todd in the Shadows is NSFW now?

Anyone know why it's not on youtube yet?

The sponsor hasn't approved the ad yet.

Edited by Motyka5 on Mar 23rd 2021 at 12:25:10 PM

I opened a new thread in "Ask the Tropers" about spoilering new entries if anyone's interested in adding to the discussion.

In the meantime, Todd has posted TRAINWRECKORDS: "St. Anger" by Metallica. *donk* *donk* *donk*

Edited by apathetictales on Mar 24th 2021 at 1:26:25 AM

St. Anger is what metal music sounds like to people who don't like metal music.

On one hand, the album as it came out is painful to listen to… On the other hand, I listened to a full fan-made cover with actual drums, good production and the more repetitive parts trimmed down and it sounded… incredibly forgettable.

Similarly, when they started playing some of those songs live again a couple years ago, Kirk added solos to them but they felt somewhat out of place.

So in a way, maybe all the bad ideas are what made the album memorable, albeit in the worst way.

Is being memorable for screwing up better than being forgettable?

I honestly can't listen to anything from St. Anger without cracking up. It sounds like what a parody of Metallica would sound like except coming from Metallica themselves.

I'll just say I'm one of those St. Anger apologists, and don't even think it's their worst album (That would be one of the Loads; which one varies depending on my mood that day).

I wouldn't call it a return to form, by any means, but I did get a sense of "Well, they're at least trying again" from it. Contrast with Load/Reload, where they are (As Todd said) "acting gay" probably in an attempt to shock people to make up for the fact that their music was as inoffensive as it had ever been ("Stock", to use one of Lars's phrases).

I do agree that in hindsight, it was probably an example of "The 'comeback' album even the band knew was bad even at the time, but that they had to make in order to avoid complete self-destruction". This is an album type that has a proud tradition; Elton John's Reg Strikes Back is such an album per his statement in his Behind the Music episode, and The Rolling Stones had such an album in the 1970s, though I can't remember which one (It's brought up in "According to The Rolling Stones").

Having said all that, the album falls victim to the "Behind-the-Scenes Paradox". It's been attributed to one of Siskel or Ebert specifically in relation to film, but heavily paraphased, it basically says "A work is an automatic failure if the behind-the-scenes on it is more interesting than the work itself". That definitely applies here.

This Todd In The Shadows episode was very light on the shadows. There were a lot of relatively clear glimpses of his face in this one.Yes I'm sure his face is out there on the internet somewhere but I don't want to ruin the mystery of the persona for myself.

Yup. As someone who has only very recently come around to metal...this is the sound I've always tried to avoid. It's incoherent, it's noisy, and it somehow manages to overstimulate and bore me at the same time. I would love to get into Metallica but I see that this isn't a great place to start.

Edited by deuteragonist on Mar 24th 2021 at 6:40:59 AM

I don’t know… but in Metallica’s case at least, it ironically contributed to their legend. If they had just released an okay or mildly bad album, maybe they would have faded into obscurity, who knows.

It’s interesting to note that Load/Reload already had some of the problems that plagued St. Anger − namely the excessive padding and repetitive structures. Though I still like listening to some parts of them (I’m definitely in the "take five or six songs of each to make one solid album" crowd). The Outlaw Torn remains one of my favorite Tallica songs.

Edited by Lyendith on Mar 24th 2021 at 3:02:35 PM

As a fan of noise rock and grunge, I actually enjoyed St. Anger more than any other Metallica album. Despite what Todd said in the video, I think this album has at least a few good riffs that stuck in my head for a long while. A lot of the lyrics are quite silly, but there's some appeal about hearing someone try their hardest to give shape to their bundled-up emotions and let them all out. There's also a kind of ferocity there that is missing from nu-metal, which is why, like Todd, I never understood people who said Metallica was trying to be Korn or whatever on that album.

To be fair though, I much prefer this fan-made version to the original recording. Here, a lot of the songs have been made shorter ("Invisible Kid" is now half its original length, which is an absolute blessing), the production is much better, the snare has been reined in, and someone sounding amazingly like James re-did the vocal parts to not sound like they've been done in one take. I highly recommend this version, this is probably as good as St. Anger could possibly get.

Yeah, agreed on pretty much everything here. Given my previous penchant for "Incredibly imperfect to the point of it probably being a bad idea, yet undeniably honest and a snapshot of where the artist was in their life at the time" albums (SEE: My posting here a while back about the Lauryn Hill Unplugged 2.0 album), I love this album for that. It, more than any other Metallica album, reflects where the band was personally and professionally through the music.

(Second place in that would go to ...Justice. At the risk of reading too much into it, and knowing the technical reasons for it, I can't help but think the almost complete lack of bass on that album was, in part, the band still processing the death of Cliff Burton. Also, my understanding is that as the band matured up to Puppets, Cliff was still hugely influential in the songwriting, less in explicit songwriting credits than as an "editor" of sorts—basically, if Cliff wasn't feeling something, they'd probably drop it. ...Justice is my favorite Metallica album and one of my favorites of all-time, but I can see where it suffers from the loss of someone saying "Hey do we really need ALL of these riffs in ONE song?")

As for St. Anger's sound, I kind of view it as something similar to what Rush did throughout their career. Rush were always aware of what was going on in the larger music world around them and would incorporate elements of it, but remained undeniably Rush while doing it. I feel like St. Anger is similar—it's not just Metallica aping nu-metal, it's them giving some of its tropes (The dropped tunings, the lack of solos) The Metallica Treatment.

x4: As a guy whose edgy middle school years were defined by Metallica, I think the best place to start is either the Black Album, Master of Puppets, or Ride the Lightning. Black Album is their most commercially successful and mainstream friendly before the so called sell-out years, while the other two are widely hailed as their best works overall. I like both Kill 'Em All and ...And Justice For All, but they're definitely both a bit rougher for a new person to get into.

Some could argue that Black Album is the beginning of the sell-out period. Although I do like it despite it being massively inferior to the first four.

Also "full eight minutes of Harverster of Sorrow". That song doesn't even crack six Todd! You truly are a normie as you said.

Edited by DeadlyAssassin on Mar 25th 2021 at 8:13:29 PM

It’s actually a bit funny that they reduced the songs’ length (relatively) in the Black Album because those in AJFA were "too long"… only to make them even longer in the following records. The difference being that the early albums were 40 to 50 minutes long, not 75 minutes.

Maybe he was thinking of The Frayed Ends of Sanity? That one's just under 8 minutes.

I mean, if the album can be enjoyed as a repetitive collection of neat guitar tones and emotional lyrics, you might as well listen to Swans where they craft that sort of thing intentionally. As a fellow fan of noise, I'd also say there's a few neat riffs in there.

After St. Anger, Todd's now also done a big one for OHW, now on Patreon:

...

.......

... DISCO DUUUUUUUCK (not an April Fools joke!)

God, no.

The horror, the horror...

I would like to know who committed that.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the info on whether Crazy Frog was a one-hit wonder. Turns out it is. Imagine the potential episode...

Question to all Todd In The Shadows fans, what is the most wanted future OHW episode?

For me, it’s Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club, as it would be fun to see the Talking Heads connections. Though of me would love to see him do an obscure 90s one (e.g. Not An Addict by K’s Choice, Bound to the Floor by Local H, Dizz Knee Land by dada), but those aren’t likely.