620. Lou Reed & Metallica / Lulu. 2011. 0.5/5

I cannot say that there was any moment - from the first rumours until its ultimate release and my initial listenings - that I thought that this was going to be very good, or that it was a good idea. However, the great thing about being hugely successful icons of the music industry (as both parties here undoubtedly are) and not necessarily having to do things for the money anymore, is that you can do practically anything you suddenly have a fetish for without any qualms or problems. To me, this fits in perfectly here for both Metallica and Lou Reed.
So you can't go in expecting it to be a Lou Reed album, and you can't go in expecting it to be a Metallica album. Well, what the hell can you expect?!

In the end, it is a motley of farcical spoken ranting, repetitive monotonous and grainy instrumental backing music that bores you almost to a coma in passages, and uncomfortable leaderless song compositions. It's hard to get enthused about something that is about as exciting as watching paint dry. The songs, in most cases, are just sooooooooo long for no reward. The song structures appear to just be make them as long as possible without actually doing anything interesting either musically or vocally. The final two songs alone stretch for almost 31 minutes. Are you kidding me? Why was it thought this was necessary? Was there no one in the studio who thought to say "hey guys... a little long here"? Honestly, two CDs totalling almost 90 minutes is just further proof that this was a love fest for both parties, doing what they felt like without a strong producer there to try and wind the egos back to reality. Maybe - MAYBE - if this had been edited down in to a CD album lasting maybe 50 minutes to an hour... no, even that wouldn't have saved it.

Start off with four minutes of James chanting "Small town giiiirrrll" while other endless words are spoken by Reed ("Brandenburg Gate"). Then there's the four minutes of the same riff while interchanging Reed's poetry and James half-arsed 'chorus' before a quick solo break ("The View"). Then there is seven and a half minutes of noise, UNPLEASANT squealing noise, broken up by a little bit of decent work from Lars, but generally just awful ("Pumping Blood").
"Mistress Dread" starts out promisingly, but then you realise that it is just the same guitar/drum riff for five freaking minutes, with Reed droning on over the top of it, then a slight change for the remaining two minutes of the song. Ditto "Iced Honey", a reasonable hard rock riff that doesn't change for four and a half minutes. "Cheat On Me", eleven and a half minutes of rubbish. "Frustration" (plenty of that by this time, I can assure you) has the closest thing to a decent riff so far on the album - it sounds incredibly like a Black Sabbath riff - but it is wasted here in this song and arrangement. "Little Dog" sounds like something grunge bands use as their "hidden track" at the end of a CD. In other words eight minutes of crap.
And yet, after all of that, it is not ALL bad. There are small pockets of time here when your ears prick up, and you think "wow... there's great riff" or "hey, I like that fill", mostly probably within the songs "Frustration" and "Dragon". It's just that they come so infrequently and are drowned out by so much average rubbish that they cannot lift the entire album from out of the mire of mediocrity. "Junior Dad" at almost twenty minutes is just an album killer - seriously, anyone who mades it this far is really going to have trouble getting through this monster shocker.

In the long run, Lou Reed and Metallica did this project for themselves, and no doubt enjoyed themselves doing it and creating it. I'm sure they would have preferred that it was universally loved rather than panned, but that hasn't - and can't be - the case. I can't speak for Lou Reed fans, but for Metallica fans, it is something best not spoken about.