Wednesday 3 December 2014

Analysis of Metallica's St. Anger Digipak















When researching digipaks of the rock genre I started by looking at Metallica's 'St.Anger'. As you can see the Digipak for Metallica's 2003 album, 'St. Anger', is extremely detailed with typography, imagery, graphics as well as other added extras.

 Surprisingly the bands logo, nor the album title itself has been indicated on the front cover. However the famous metal band did use the iconography of the fist bound by rope in order to indicate that it's their album. The fist connotes anger and the ropes connote restraint. This feeling of anger is represented throughout the entire album itself. 'St.Anger' was recorded at a time when the band were trying to break from the restraints of their previous albums and experiment with different musical styles.

 The colors on the outside cover are a binary opposition to the inside covers as they are extremely bright and eye catching to obtain peoples attention; whereas the inside cover is much darker and features much duller colors to represent the traditional themes of the genre.

As it's clear to see every side of the digipak has been used for its own individual purpose. On the 3 outside panels there is the eye catching album cover itself, the 11 song track-list, and artwork related to the front cover of the album. The artwork denotes the face of which the iconic fist on the front cover belongs too and over the 11 years since the album's release, this image of the red zombie has gone on to become a graphic which is greatly related to Metallica.

On the inside panels there is a sleeve for the extremely detailed booklet which features information on the band, credits, lyrics, photos and more. The central panel, conforming to the traditional layout of a digipak, is the 'St. Anger' record itself, and below that there is the bands logo and the albums name. On the final panel there is a bonus CD featuring rehearsals for the album, entitled "St. Anger Rehearsals".  The CD itself replicates the front cover as it has the same image of the bound fist but on the CD it is in a much slicker looking black and white rather than the overload of color on the front cover.

The use of typography of the album title has been replicated around the digipak on the CD and also the bonus CD. The band have been known to often have new typography for each album which again is a cliche of Metallica.

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