Thursday, October 20, 2011

LULU: Lou Reed and Metallica Full Album Review

Yes, it is finally here: This album is getting wretched reviews which i don't really understand. I do understand that very, very devoted Metallica might feel alienated by the band for taking on the project, which doesn't sound that much like Metallica normally sound. I would be so bold as to suggest that this was much more a Lou Reed album then a Metallica album. The songs are mostly very long, which is going to turn off some audiences.
However, is you put this album next to rock and roll bands from the last ten years that Have gotten attention, the Strokes or whatever indie rock bands, the sophistication and playing ability on this album blows all of that away.
In certain ways it is a throwback for Lou Reed to his Velvet Underground days. Lou Reed and Metallica laired a lot of heavy guitars on top of each other, going for a sort of update of Lou Reed's White Light/White Heat album- it has a very big sound There is a lot of feedback and dissonance on this album.They have some strings sounds that are a reapportion of John Cale's electric viola playing with the Velvet Underground. There is a lot of drone exploration on this album, in particular on the track "Little Dog".
The way I understand this album is that in the early days of the Velvet Underground in the 60's, Lou Reed was clearly doing things that preceded and influenced what was to come in the genres of punk, gothic/industrial, and yes, even extreme metal in terms of volume, dissonance, use of feedback, and drone. For most of the last 40 years of his solo career he was seemingly out of touch with what he had helped create, and was making largely surprisingly tame records. In 1979, Joy Division idolized Lou Reed, but really it probably should have been Lou Reed trying to get Ian Curtis on the phone. For this album he has a metal band at his disposal. "The View" and "Little Dog" sound like doom metal sort of, like the band Earth. Other tracks like "Mistress Dread" sounds kind of like a gothic metal band like Moonspell. "Junior Dad" sounds almost kind of like an extended version of a Cure song, "Mistress Dread" almost sounds a little bit like the Joy Division song "Twenty-Four Hours". With a metal band behind Lou Reed he kind of recaptures what he was in 1967-1968. The whole thing about the lyrics being inspired by the German plays of Frank Wedekind is kind of misleading. The trick of taking lyrical themes of sadomasochism from works of older European literature goes back all the way to "Venus in Furs" on the first Velvet Underground album.
Metallica serving as Lou Reed's back-up band do a fine job. I think this material would have been really boring if it had just been released as Lou Reed's new album. It essentially would have just sounded like Lou Reed's album The Raven, except with references to Wedekind's work instead of Poe's. It's definitely the heaviest album Lou Reed has made since White Light/White Heat.
It is what it is.

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