Review Summary: "Do you like spaghetti? Do you like ice cream? Would you ever eat them together?"
Nothing about this seemed like a good idea when it was announced.
Metallica, for all their years of being perhaps the most successful heavy metal band of all time, are unquestionably fading into the background of today’s music scene. Their partner-in-crime, Lou Reed, is now sixty-nine years old and hasn’t written anything significant in decades. Add the fact that the parties involved made careers out of entirely different styles of music, and you have
Lulu. It’s bad, folks. You might have once thought that Metallica would never outsuck
St.Anger, their most vilified release to date. And while this is technically not a Metallica album, the fact remains that this is the bottom of the barrel for James and the boys.
The whole thing reeks of desperation. Just from listening to the ridiculously long collection of songs, it’s fairly easy to tell that both Metallica and Lou Reed are attempting to cling to their respective reputations as a selling point. Indeed, you have to think that long-time Metallica fans will pick up this album simply because of the band involved, only to likely use it as a coaster (or a Frisbee.) For that reason, the band probably assumes that they can put out anything they want, because people are always going to buy it. That does not excuse them, however, for this miserable pile of garbage. In fact, it actually incriminates them even more for expecting everyone to buy into what they're selling.
The music itself is just a complete and utter mess, not that any band could realistically make gold out of a senile man singing from a perspective of a female prostitute. Lou Reed sounds like a hobo that James and Lars handpicked from the dumpster behind their studio. His lyrics make absolutely no sense, and they actually border on being painful to listen to. “Waggle my ass like a dark prostitute coagulating heart-pumping blood” has to be the worst line ever conceived by man, and gems like “To be dry and spermless like a girl” and “I swallow your sharpest curdle like a coloured man’s dick” are nothing short of vomit inducing. Metallica sounds bored and lifeless, constantly repeating senseless riffs that just go nowhere. When they aren’t trying to hammer plodding riffs into the listener’s ears, they’re awkwardly plucking strings and strumming patterns that sound like Creativity Hour at the local mental hospital. I mean, at least St. Anger had songs that followed a certain formula (granted, the formula was pretty terrible.) This just sounds like a bunch of kids noodling around in their basement while Grandpa Jim rambles about life in his easy chair.
In short, this is a clear example of something that should have never seen the light of day. The best part is that these windbags actually had the audacity to make the whole thing two disks long, as if it was some kind of great achievement. When Metallica wrote “The Thing That Should Not Be” back in 1986, they were actually predicting the release of Lulu twenty-five years later. Maybe they should have retired while they were ahead and gone into the fortune-telling business. At least that way we could have been spared the downward spiral that finally hit rock bottom on this release. If Cliff could hear this, he’d probably bitch slap James and Lars until they agreed to stop making music forever. Lulu is nothing more than a future bargain-bin resident, doomed to forever be the ugly red-headed stepchild of Metallica’s career.
