Lou Reed and Metallica - Lulu

The pairing is so unusual that one is inclined to immediately react with “Wha?” followed by a gut-checked “It’s gonna suck.”

And after listening to Lulu, I would encourage everyone to listen to their impulse reaction.

I’m curious to hear the responses of people who are admitted fans of this record, true loyalists who find some redeeming value to this project, beyond the canned responses that I’ve been hearing all along. Sure, the making of Lulu may have indeed been a liberating experience for the members of Metallica, but how liberating is it for fans of either artist who already view each new release with a distrusting eye?

Because ultimately, Lulu will have to be defended by them and they should be prepared for a long, arduous journey.

The entire idea of matching Lou Reed with Metallica doesn't make sense. The band is not known for rubbing shoulders with the avant-garde while Reed isn't exactly known for running around in thrash circles.

To be polite, the two sound as uncomfortable together on tape as they do in your mind.

At one point during “Pumping Blood,” the band repeats a monotonous guitar figure while Reed barks out the song title, occasionally breaking out into what appear to be verses. One example during the song finds Lou spitting “Waggle my ass like a dog prostitute coagulating heart…Pumping blood...C’mon James!”

He’s encouraging Hetfield because the song-as does most of the album-plods along like a lazy rehearsal. No interesting riffs arrive and Lars Ulrich tentatively drums the whole mess into nothing. There’s huge holes in some of his parts suggesting that he could have been replaced by Mo Tucker and Lulu would have least sounded rhythmically appealing.

There are no solos for Kirk Hammett in Lulu and I could hear no evidence that he wanted to get his feet wet with any real weirdness to break up the endless parade of jug-jug-jugs and big chord bridges. At some points, and I don’t know if it’s James or Kirk playing, you can hear someone pick up an acoustic guitar and start playing like they have no idea what they’re supposed to be doing.

And if you turn the volume up as loud as you can on Lulu, you may be able to hear the voice of bassist Robert Trujillo muttering under his breath “What the fuck am I doing here? I wonder if I can get my gig with Suicidal Tendencies back?”

There’s something going on with Reed’s mouth too, and you can hear it throughout the record. I mean, if you’re intending for Lulu to be powerful, provocative, right?! He sounds like an old man with a lazy drawl. Hard consonants are a challenge for Lou and when he musters enough strength to scream, it sounds as though he’s merely shaking free a bunch of mucus in the back of his throat. “I want so much to hurtcha!” he threatens on “Frustration” with about as much menace as a grandpa trying to figure out how to work the remote.

There are moments where you can audibly hear Lou breathing through his nose, further suggesting the grandpa factor.

But the ground zero of shittyness is the lyrics that Reed attempts to spew out. He’s prominent in the mix, giving listeners a good glimpse of his parade of crap. There are moments when you’re jaw will drop in shock (“You’re more man than I/To be dead to have no feeling/To be dry and spermless/Like a girl/Like a girl!”). There are moments when your mouth will just be agape while your head shakes in disbelief (“The taste of your vulva…and everything on it!”). And there are moments where you’ll just blurt out in laughter (“The female dog don’t care what you got/As long as you can raise that little doggie face/To a cold-hearted pussy”).

It sounds like an improvisational affair, a project initiated on a whim while becoming a permanent artifact will be remembered as nothing more than a “What the fuck?!” moment. Generations will ponder it, and you may even find a few weirdoes in the corner that will defend this moment.

Ignore them. There’s nothing remotely redeeming here.

Lulu is something that may have indeed been something therapeutic for those involved, and it may even hold a special place in their heart. But that doesn’t mean it should have been offered a legitimate release date. It’s something that should have left to the vaults, a curio whose legend grows from its own silence.

Unfortunately, it’s here. It’s real. And it’s awful.



This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

Metallica and Lou Reed Pretend To Make An Album Together

Metallica and Lou Reed.

Even on paper, this doesn’t sound good.

And while Rolling Stone’s David Fricke seems to think this is some match made in heaven, I’m of the opinion that David Fricke gets a little too worked up about things that may need to be viewed after first taking a deep breath.

This is one of those things.

I may be paraphrasing here, but I could have swore that he compared this to a Master Of Puppets meets Berlin or something equally as dumb or completely off-based. There is no way that it will be anywhere near Puppets or Berlin because 1.) Cliff is dead and 2.) Lou can’t remember the chord progression to “Lady Day.”

The collaboration is as simple as two artists without the hassle of a record contract, dicking around together because they can afford to.

For Reed, it’s probably a matter of his ego getting stroked by an immensely popular band who haven’t done anything creatively relevant for over twenty years. Of course, Lou is too old to understand this, but then again, Reed hasn’t been creatively relevant for over twenty years either, but nobody has got balls big enough to advise him of this.

And nobody will have the balls big enough to advise him that this project is ridiculous either. But mark my words, someone at Q Prime will politely tell the band that this pairing is not in line with the inroads they made to re-secure their fan base with Death Magnetic.

That album was more of a stop the bleeding effort, a public relations image builder than it was an actual creative re-birth. Do you really believe the band looked forward to revisiting the old thrash formula after spending well over a decade trying to flee from it?

And after re-establishing their popularity and attempting to regain some of the fans who got tired of their shenanigans, do you think Cliff Burnstein is going to let them release a full-length collaboration with Lou Reed? A record that’s based on the writings of German author Frank Wedekind?

No chance.

At best, this ends up on an overly-hyped Lou Reed album, in much the same way that all the eggheads creamed themselves over The Raven while most Reed fans declared that album to be a piece of shit.

If any of this does manage to end up on a Metallica disc, it will be done in a single song offering, not a full-length.

And it will be just as well-received as Reed’s other hard rock collaboration, Kiss’ The Elder.

Metallica - Death Magnetic

Prologue: I had a dream the other night where I found myself backstage, in some bland dressing room at some unnamed arena. Inside of the windowless concrete bunker, I found myself alone with a modern-date James Hetfield. I knew this because the Hetfield in my dream had short hair and was relatively soft spoken.
For some reason, I felt the need to begin throwing body shots to James but, as is the case with some dreams, every punch had no impact on him.
He just stood there, stoically allowing me to hit his mid-section.
Then, he began to laugh at me.
I analyzed the dream on the way to work the next morning and came up with the following explanation: No matter how loud I bellow at how shitty Metallica is now, it has no impact on the band at all. They will still make albums and they will still be received with great anticipation by their fans. Regardless of what I think, there are millions of others who think otherwise. The frustration I feel about the band means nothing because there are a hundred times more people that will buy anything with their logo on the cover and have little consideration for what is inside.
Metallica, it seems, feels the same way.
Here's a review of their latest from a few months ago:

Death Magnetic is the best album that Metallica has released since …And Justice For All.
Now take a quick peek at the band’s catalog since that release and listen as the air escape from that hot air statement. What’s even more fabricated are the tales originating of how Rick Rubin set out to make an album with the same type of quality control as Master Of Puppets. It is that highlight from the numerous pre-release hype machines that had me, and thousands of others, that Metallica might have indeed come to their senses and set out to make an album that redeemed themselves after nearly twenty years of calculated bids for mainstream acceptance and embarrassing side steps. Yet there was that nagging understanding that there is no way that Metallica could make an album as good as Puppets regardless of who’s name is listed as producer. What we really wanted to see was if Metallica could make an album as good as Justice.
Justice is a more appropriate benchmark because, and this is something that I’ve firmly believed ever since The Black Album, the spirit of Metallica is no longer with us. The late Cliff Burton seemed to embody the idea that it was the band’s responsibility to test themselves before anything else and he also seemed to be the voice of reason that the band ultimately needed, and spent the better part of two decades trying to find again. After he was so callously taken, the burden of running Metallica was shared by a pair of drunks with major communication issues and a guitar player who seems incapable of any form of confrontation unless he’s plugged in to an amplifier. Justice possesses the residue of Burton’s spirit while everything beyond it found an outsider, Bob Rock, serving as the band’s resident headmaster. He filled each album with an abundance of radio-ready songs that were heavy on rock formula and devoid of any of that aforementioned thrash spirit.
There is no spirit…anywhere….on Death Magnetic. It is as by the numbers as anything the band has done in the past twenty years and it demonstrates that the band, specifically James Hetfield, has actually reached a point where he thinks that returning to the type of music that made them so legendary means that he needs to dumb down his lyrics. Words are thrown together with phonetic abandon, totally disregarding their meaning while gaining inclusion on the sheer merits that they sound gnarly.
Musically, there are some moments of heart-swooning aggression. Beginning with the opener “That Was Just Your Life,” a so unmistakably awesome that you start to consider “Holy shit. These guys just might have pulled it off,”
With greater scrutiny, however, you begin to see the formula. It’s perfectly executed, so the formula is carefully hidden underneath layers of precise guitars and some of the most aggressive arrangements the band has come up with in years. But Death Magnetic at its core is a patch job of rehearsal riffs, eloquently pieced together under the pretense of some retarded concept (death, I guess) and the mighty pen of their management company’s press release.
The documentary Some Kind Of Monster did more than shed light on the dysfunction of Metallica’s communication skills, it showed us how the band creates music post Black Album. Guitar parts are mined, saved to a hard drive, and then pasted together with other riffs until they form a collective song.
Sometimes it works (the aforementioned “That Was Just Your Life,” “All Nightmare Long”) to the point where the sounds actually sound rehearsed. But more often than not, they just sound like cherry-picked riffs held together by ProTools, waiting for the human interaction to happen during the rehearsals for Death Magnetic’s world tour.
Ironically, one of the album’s strongest cuts occurs when they strip away the thrash nostalgia and buddy up to the hard rock mantra that made them household names. “The Day That Never Comes” sounds like the kind of Metallica that we’ve come to expect over the past 15 years, or come to resent depending on what side of the fence you’re sitting on. I’m firmly entrenched on the side that they’re trying to cater to with Death Magnetic, but I understand that they’ve had more years now at adapting to being a rock band than they did during their ascent. Maybe that’s why “The Day That Never Comes” sounds so credible. It may not be what I like in Metallica, but I’m resigned to admitting that they’re very good at being a hard rock band and that song proves it.
Much has been said of the over-use of compression on this album and it’s true. There is no dynamic to this record at all. It barks and carries very little death. Repeated listening not only provides listeners with a certain amount of audio fatigue, it also points to a more serious question: Where the fuck is Robert Trujillo? If I recall, nearly everyone in the band wet themselves over his ability, to the tune of a $1,000,000 advance, full partnership rights, and “It hadn’t been played that way since Cliff” comparisons. All of this praise and money, apparently, has been flushed down the toilet as Trujillo, regardless of his abilities, is completely off the radar in the mix. Whether this is another Jason Newstead type of “initiation” is not clear, but one would think that someone with Rick Rubin’s resume could have suggested that they turn up Trujillo’s contributions.
Speaking of contributions, guitarist Kirk Hammett’s is critical. He’s a maniac throughout Death Magnetic and that’s a good thing. Without Hammett’s brutal guitar work, this album would fall under the weight of Hetfield’s sub-par lyrics, Lars Ulrich’s standard issue drumming, and the Frankenstein arrangements.
There’s a huge difference between needing to make and album and having to make one. Metallica had to make Death Magnetic or be forced to contend with a fast eroding fan base. Considering the drama that prefaced the new album, it’s a fine effort that assuredly serves its purpose and stops the bloodletting. Underneath this band-aid remains a wound that can no longer heal, the pain from it is the reality that Metallica has now logged more years as a mega-platinum rock band than a hungry and challenging thrash band. When you listen to Death Magnetic with this mindset, it’s easy to consider it as a return of the band’s youthful exuberance. But when you remember the spirit that fueled their early work, Death Magnetic is nothing more than an open casket visitation.

This review originally appeared in Glorious Noise.

My Lifestyle Determines My Deathstyle

I had half a mind to review the new Metallica album without even listening to it. The album would have received one star and would have been based entirely on this photo alone. It symbolizes the entire notion that Metallica will never be able to return to their former greatness musically because they are morally corrupt.
Anyone who has built their empire on the shoulders and wallets of metal’s bretheren would not be seen wearing Armani or any other designer clothes or at the very least buying them. Let’s consider that the bag isn’t for James Hetfield, he should have known better that it’s images like this that help destroy the band name of Metallica.
I hope he’s investing well and isn’t squandering all of his money on shit like this, because more and more people will be scratching their heads at why they should invest in yet another shitty album or tour just to fund Hetfield’s shopping sprees.
I’m not suggesting that the man not go shopping or enjoy the fruits of his labors. What I am suggesting is that if you can pay $40,000 a month for a leech to help with your interpersonal skills, you can throw someone a grand to do your Armani shopping for you.
Never mind the reality that if you were to ask the members of Metallica twenty years ago today if they’d like a complimentary Armani item, they would probably laugh at you and rip up the offending item.
And it’s good to see that Robert Trujillo has put his $1,000,000 advance to good use too.