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.
