LouTallica - "Lulu"

[Johnny Scumm]

The Album that nobody wanted to listen to was listened to by myself today, from beginning to end, every second of it. There's only 10 tracks, but none of them are below 4 minutes in length, the longest track just being short of 20 minutes long. Here's the track listing in case you want to have a look;

1. "Brandenburg Gate" 4:19
2. "The View" 5:17
3. "Pumping Blood" 7:24
4. "Mistress Dread" 6:51
5. "Iced Honey" 4:36
6. "Cheat on Me" 11:26
7. "Frustration" 8:34
8. "Little Dog" 8:01
9. "Dragon" 11:08
10. "Junior Dad" 19:29​

Now, having listened to the album I can give my true opinion on it. Everyone was jumping on it for being terrible and to be honest, as strange as the pairing is, I sort of like it the more I listen to it. It's difficult at first to want to carry on listening to it. You do just want to stop instantly, but DON'T! I was strangely drawn in by the voice of Reed and this classic Metallica sound I could hear in the background. Hetfield's vocals on Brandenburg Gate, the opening track, are really quite interesting and loud in the distance. This following review from the Montreal Gazette gave the Album 5/5.

Lou Reed and Metallica

Lulu

(Warner Bros.)

Rating: 5 out of 5

A word about the rarely deployed five-star rating: There are different types of classics. Metal Machine Music, for instance

Lou Reed's notorious 1975 slab of white noise has been brought up in discussions of Lulu, as if to underline how loony the underground-rock icon can be. A better frame of reference would be his 2003 album The Raven - an homage to Edgar Allan Poe that featured, among other guests, Steve Buscemi. Surely it was impossible for him to come up with a more bizarre collaborative project.

The lesson here: Don't underestimate Lou Reed. The idea of Reed and Metallica playing together is as likely as well, pick two random names from your record collection. Sure, both acts delight in turning their amps to 12, both boast their own brand of coarseness, and both look good in black. But Reed's street poetry has rarely been a headbanger's delight, and Metallica has never visited the art-rock ghetto.

If they somehow pulled off a perfect fusion of two very different esthetics, their album probably wouldn't be as entertaining as it is. It's tempting to describe Lulu as a train wreck, but it's more like a three-headed goat: an abomination that laughs at the laws of nature, but defies you to turn away.

Most of Lulu adheres to a basic approach: Reed jabbers as if he's making a particularly unfocused Lou Reed album, and Metallica tightly thrashes away as if this is a Metallica album. There are two exceptions: Brandenburg Gate's hushed intro leads into a disciplined rocker where Reed's speak-sing actually meshes with the music. (If there's some unintentional comedy to Metallica frontman James Hetfield bellowing ``small-town guh-url'' ad nauseam, it's nothing compared to what follows.) And Junior Dad features an uncharacteristically tender vocal from Reed, cathartic tension-and-release playing, and a subtly changing string-section drone that draws the track's running time out to 19? minutes. If anything, it feels too short.

That's the good stuff. The bad stuff is even better. The View typifies Loutallica's stitched-together perversity - the moment when Hetfield's bark overtakes Reed is priceless - and despite his collaborators' best efforts at conjuring dangerous rage, Reed's croak betrays every one of his 69 years on Pumping Blood. Iced Honey has conciseness on its side, but suggests there is no common ground between Sweet Jane and Enter Sandman. And the hilariously vulgar Little Dog sounds like it took half as long to write as to play. (At eight minutes, it's not even one of the four longest songs on this double album.)

Metallica is barely present on the latter track, and if you need further evidence of who's in the driver's seat, Lulu draws inspiration from long-dead German expressionist Frank Wedekind. There's a semi-discernible plot line about a young woman's debasement and Jack the Ripper and a whole lot of blood, and all the lyrics are Reed's. There are some doozies amid all the Grand Guignol hysteria, notably Pumping Blood's already immortal ``waggle my ass like a dark prostitute.'' (Sadly, the lyric sheet disproves early theories that Reed is singing ``dog prostitute.'' It says a lot about the album that that phrase was even considered possible.)

After a dozen listens, Lulu still makes as much sense as icing a cake with mayonnaise. But it's unforgettable, which is more than you can say about Mistrial or ReLoad, and there isn't a dull moment in listening to Reed and Metallica trying to plow each other down. So, yeah: instant classic.

This is from pitchfork.com, where the album only gets 1/10;

When Metallica announced last June that they had recorded a new album with Lou Reed, fans of both artists responded with confusion, if not outright despair. But while this partnership may seem random, the two actually have a lot in common. Both abuse electric guitars; both like to wear black and be photographed by Anton Corbijn; both have indulged in lifestyles that threatened to become death-styles; both have a habit of alienating their fans by taking ill-advised stylistic detours and, by extension, both are considered by many to be class-A assholes. But while these surface similarities may provide the two parties with small-talk/commiseration fodder when, say, hanging backstage before murdering "Sweet Jane" at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, they're pretty miserable grounds for a full-on collaboration, especially one that spans two discs and close to 90 minutes. And yet, showing their usual proud disregard for their fans and music in general, Lou Reed and Metallica have gone and made Lulu anyway.

It'd be one thing if Lulu were being slipped into the marketplace as a low-profile curiosity, akin to a 90s-era spoken word album with some alt-rocker screeching away in the background. Instead, it's being trumpeted by its makers as a historic event. In a now-infamous interview, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich recall bursting into tears of pride during the recording sessions, while in another Reed grinningly insists that Metallica has "pushed me to the best I've ever been." It was one of many unintentional jokes in an online promo campaign that effectively ruined Lulu's chances of being taken seriously before it was even heard.

Lulu was first previewed with an especially repellent 30-second tract of "The View" that confirmed everyone's worst suspicions of the project-- namely, that Reed's crotchety, atonal poem-rants would be wholly incompatible with Metallica's fidgety riffage. The clip's most prominent lyric ("Throw it away/ For worship someone who actively despises you!") seemed to mock both artists' most forgiving fans for even clicking on the link. By the time "The View" was released in its full, five-minute ghastliness-- with Hetfield variously professing himself to be a table, a 10-story building and, possibly, the premier member of Philly hip-hop band the Roots-- the Internet had all the evidence it needed to preemptively crown Lulu the Worst Album of All Time.

But even in that regard, Lulu disappoints. For all the hilarity that ought to ensue here, Lulu is a frustratingly noble failure. Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission-- the average song length clocks in at eight excruciating minutes. Still, it's kind of fascinating to hear two veteran entities trying like hell to excavate common ground that simply does not exist.

Lulu's source material-- a series of transgressive plays by Munich playwright Frank Wedekind about a stripper who becomes a social-climber only to wind up a prostitute-- allows Reed to set a familiar Berlin scene with "Brandenburg Gate", a would-be anthem that, with a less torturous delivery, could almost pass for something from Reed's mid-1970s songbook. Instead, we get Hetfield belting out its "small town girl" chorus like he's trying to summon the next featured attraction at a strip club.

Reed's influence also feels responsible for the ominous, omnipresent Velvets-esque string textures and a couple of curiously avant guitar solos from Kirk Hammett (see: "Dragon"). Metallica, meanwhile, inspired Reed to come up with at least one perfectly metal lyric ("I cry icicles in my stein"), while getting him to update the S&M suggestiveness of "Venus in Furs" to the bloodlusty standards of the modern-day headbanger. However, a great deal of Lulu's songs find Reed graphically describing violent, depraved sexual trysts from the female protagonist's perspective, and with lines like "I will swallow your sharpest cutter like a colored's man dick" in abundance, some dyed-in-the-denim Metallica fans could be squirming like they did when Kirk started wearing eyeliner.

Unfortunately, these small surprises can't save Lulu from the much larger issue that lies directly at its core: For most of the record, Lou Reed and Metallica barely sound like they're on the same planet, let alone in the same room; the album works neither as powerful rock music nor as an impressionistic soundtrack to a spoken narrative. Reed's monotone remains unresponsive to what's happening around him whether the occasion calls for full-torque thrash ("Mistress Dread") or dreary acoustic mood pieces ("Little Dog"), while Lars Ulrich's flailing fills during the breakdowns on "Pumping Blood" and "Frustration" are essentially drummerese for "what the fuck do I do with this?" But for all of Reed's meandering, a-melodic verbosity, it's actually Hetfield who sounds the most out of place here; beyond his self-parodic turn on "The View", he contributes intrusive back-ups to the bar-band slog "Iced Honey" and the maddeningly repetitious "Cheat on Me" like someone in the back row of a class photo trying to mug his way into the frame.

Remarkably, there is actually a light at the end of this dark, despairing tunnel-- and, not coincidentally, it's the song least connected to the Lulu concept. Clocking in at an absurd 19 minutes, "Junior Dad" is-- like almost everything else here-- too long by half, with its last eight minutes taken up by an extended string drone. But, despite its laughable title, "Junior Dad" possesses everything the rest of Lulu doesn't: a graceful, affecting melody, a logical arrangement, a pretty guitar line, a sympathetic narrator and, most importantly, a true synthesis of each principal's strengths, outfitting a Reed streetwise hymn with Metallica's stadium-sized crunch; it's like "Street Hassle" refashioned as a Black Album power ballad. "Junior Dad" is a song that seemingly does the impossible: it momentarily redeems the idea of a Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration as a plausible, potentially fruitful concept. But its late appearance also serves as a potent reminder of just how terribly that concept is executed on everything that precedes it.

If you don't wanna read those reviews, you don't have to. They've only been put there so that you can see what people who aren't me have to say. The last track, "Junior Dad" is the longest, but by far my favourite for all the reasons mentioned in the review above. It's a shame the rest of the album wasn't as brilliant as this one song. However saying that, I do like the other 9 songs on the album. Below is "The View", one of the shorter songs that you can listen to and gather an opinion on.

[YOUTUBE]OZsp3VMUrcs[/YOUTUBE]

Before I ask any questions, listen to this as well. "White Light/White Heat", a Velvet Underground song which you may have heard before was "remade" by LouTallica live at many different concerts. On the British music show "Later...With Jools Holland" they performed it and here it is. It took me a long time to get to like it, but now I can listen to it & enjoy it. Strangely.

[YOUTUBE]PSQAvA64mss[/YOUTUBE]

And now... questions;

1) What were your original thoughts on LouTallica before hearing the music?
2) Have you listened through "Lulu"? If so, what were your thoughts?
3) Can you appreciate that Metallica & Lou Reed were in this to try something different and if you originally disliked the idea, can you bring yourself around to like it?

 

[Twiztid Rodimus]

I can imagine that so many people will come on here, complaining that Metallica ''hasn't been good since black album'', or ''load/reload'' was horrible..or any of that typical Metallica sold out crap.. It's old, and usually said by young people riding the wave of the internet saying that crap.

Anyway, My opinion is...Lulu....isn't a metallica album. It was never meant to be. It's a experimental side project, that the band and Lou, wanted to do. When doing a project that they DIDN'T want to do comes out, just because the fans complain, THEN, they would sell out. But...NO ONE asked for this, as artists, this is what THEY wanted to do.

Is it my cup of tea? Not, entirely, but is it un-listenable...Of course not. It has high points. Pumping blood is great in my opinion. And I've listened to Metallica since 89.

It will not go down in the history books as the greatest experiment ever...BUT...nor will it go down as the worst.

Metallica never sold out...the fans did

 

[ThatPuroGuy]

1) What were your original thoughts on LouTallica before hearing the music?
I thought it was an interesting pairing and that the end result would be really good or really bad.

2) Have you listened through "Lulu"? If so, what were your thoughts?
I've listened to the entire album and I just can't get into it.

3) Can you appreciate that Metallica & Lou Reed were in this to try something different and if you originally disliked the idea, can you bring yourself around to like it?
I always appreciated experimentation in music regardless of the turn out. It means they tried something new and original instead of churning out the same ol' song and dance. I don't see myself liking this album though, it's just not for me.

 

[X]

Despite the critical beatdown this album has taken, it isn't nearly as bad as some people make it out to be. The music itself is actually pretty decent most of the time, some of the better riffage Metallica has come up with in awhile. Unfortunately Lou Reed destroys the album, and that's coming from a big Lou Reed fan here who tried to defend his work here. I just can't. I can look past the deterioration of his voice over the years, but his lyrics are dogshit through-out most of this, and again, that's coming from a longtime admirer of Reed and especially his songwriting. But the single line of "I am the table!" will forever live in rock and roll infamy as one of the most outrageously dumb and obtuse lines ever written. It's almost like someone trying to parody Reed and the bohemian culture in general. So bad.

That said, I didn't hate it as much as most seem to. I wouldn't call it a good album, but I'd say it's like a 2.5/5, about average for what you'd expect from these two entities teaming up to make an album. It's definitely a massive disappointment though.

 

[GANLEYBRAND]

1) What were your original thoughts on LouTallica before hearing the music? I thought something good was to come out of this older school meets old school

2) Have you listened through "Lulu"? If so, what were your thoughts? I stopped halfway through the first song and didn't bother with the rest of the album I couldn't bear listening to it

3) Can you appreciate that Metallica & Lou Reed were in this to try something different and if you originally disliked the idea, can you bring yourself around to like it?
Nope I can't bring myself to liking it Lou Reed's voice is god awful and there's barely any singing