On paper it seemed like an exciting idea, a chance for both Metallica and Lou Reed to try something fresh, to challenge themselves and their own song writing capabilities bringing each other out of their comfort zones. Co-produced by Metallica, Reed and Hal Willner to the major label Vertigo, it looks like the troupe had both money and freedom on their side to do everything just the way they wanted. But sadly there is nothing to hear that would really suggest it.
The result is this two part concept album, inspired by the obscure German novelist Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”. The projection of Lou’s lyrical inspiration takes the form of monologues that concern morbid admittances of lust, and perverse violence towards the character Lu Lu.
These monologues make up a total of ten tracks, the shortest being the four minute album intro, and the longest weighing in at a patience devouring nineteen minutes that finishes the album off, leaving you wondering how many days you’ve had this endurance test of an album on for.
The album is characterized sonically by Metallica’s riffs that bear a similar sound to what their fans despaired of on their last blunder, 2003’s “St. Anger” while Lou Reed sounds, well, try to imagine if you can, having to put up with your great granddad rambling on for an hour and a half about his twisted sexual deviances while shit faced after his fifth glass of whisky. Nigh unlistenable. Reed’s voice is doubtlessly the major turn off in this album. Try as he might, his croons, if they can be so called, are decadently void of tunefulness and, like his lyrics, are a pain to put up with for more than minutes at a time.
The writing process behind the recording of the album sounds bizarre as well. Nearly all rock bands, or song writers period, will tell you that song writing begins with the ideas of a bass line and a drum beat. But James Hetfield (Metallica front man) explains how the instrumentals were instead built around the pre written lyrical body work that Lou sent Metallica to write their songs on before-hand.
But seeing as Reed’s lyrical foundations take the shape of hoarse, tuneless verses of spoken word about pornographic descriptions of sex, animals, necrophilia, violence and God knows what else, it’s no wonder that instrumentally most of the guitar and drum beats feels like unsuitably desperate attempts to pump life and urgency in to these songs. Whether these lyrics are intended as strange, cryptic metaphors or not, is extremely in doubt, and not worth thinking about without either laughing in ridicule or just plain wanting to vomit.
The only track worthy of consideration for making in to a single is possibly “Iced Honey” which Reed and Metallica have played to a British TV Audience on Later With Jools Holland. At a moderate four minutes it’s one of the few that can appropriately be called a rock song for standing out as Metallica’s success of drawing attention away from Reed’s cadaverous vocal efforts with a riff that holds one of the sparse number of hooks on the record.
Jokes about the “table” or “James Hetfield is a table” or even a suggestion to hold up a giant inflatable table during Metallica’s headline set at Download festival this year have circulated online forums as a patronising reference to the track “The View. Fans of both Metallica and Reed seem to have taken the healthy reaction of looking at this album as an anomalous abomination, something to laugh at or to listen to once for a laugh and then never listen to again. Equally, that is my advice as well. Listen to it once when you’re after a laugh, and then bury it where innocent undeserving ears won’t have to suffer from it again.
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The result is this two part concept album, inspired by the obscure German novelist Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”. The projection of Lou’s lyrical inspiration takes the form of monologues that concern morbid admittances of lust, and perverse violence towards the character Lu Lu.
