Yeah, they really want you/They really want you/They really do
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[1.80]
Brad Shoup: I want this project to succeed largely because of Metallica, who’ve been playing with house money since the self-titled went quingoogle platinum. (There’s a probably a really good Russian word for something beyond cliche — and saying Metallica sucked after …And Justice For All has to qualify.) Meanwhile, proto-metaller Lou hasn’t done anything noteworthy since Songs for Drella, but he still gets his skeevy glances returned at other people’s rock shows. Reed comes out smelling the worst, for thinking that star-crossed celebrities can bring to life the stale grotesqueries of which he’s still enamored. For all their pretensions, our Bay Area boys are still pimply headbangers turned nouveau riche: trading the tapes, buying new pants. Their enthusiasm for the project is apparent — Hetfield’s cameos sound particularly terrific — but Reed isn’t meeting them halfway. He gets in a couple metal howls, but mostly sticks to jive-talking incantation, while Metallica tries to kick ass in slow-mo. While we suss out how much to care about Nevermind, Metallica’s own number-one megasmash is also marking its 20th year in stores, and you could argue it’s had a bigger impact on rock: if not as a totem, as a template. Here’s hoping Lars and Co.’s foray into high culture earns them as small a shrug as St. Kurt’s.
[3]
Anthony Easton: I own a copy of Metal Machine Music, and listen to it on a semi-regularly basis, I will defend Songs for Drella. This might be fun with Nick Cave or Josh Homme or someone who has suggested he ever had a sense of humor.
[1]
Alfred Soto: People are seriously offended by this – the Lou Reed who recorded Berlin, the most cynical of pseudo-nihilist records? The band that allowed a documentarian to film them at sinister self-help rap sessions? The results are as unwieldy as expected, with Reed’s ludicrous talk-singing atop an arhythmic churn as comfortably as a sicko sitting on a dog’s penis. Oh right — “I have no morals/some think me cheap,” he reminds us.
[1]
Iain Mew: Incomprehensible, inexplicable and… kind of incredible, but only for the duration of “I AM THE TABLE”, and you have to get through a lot of backwards drumming clashing horribly with Lou Reed to get there.
[5]
Jake Cleland: The mixing of this is so awkward that it sounds like a mash-up and given Lou’s atrocious half-talk delivery, it really could’ve done with more intricate weaving. Actually, listening to the lyrics, it’d be for the best if his vocals were so low in the mix that they could be heard… er, not at all. How is it that Lou Reed, godfather to an inhuman amount of good in music, comes out of this looking worse than motherfucking Metallica? “I have nomorals / Some think me cheap.” Goodness.
[1]
Doug Robertson: There are people for whom this sort of collaboration would be very EXCITING, but as these are the sort of people who do find this sort of thing EXCITING, we can safely ignore their opinions for the simple reason that they are clearly WRONG. But even so, on paper there is something potentially interesting about this, unfortunately the minute it gets fleshed out – well, in as much as anything involving the notoriously spindly Reed can have much in the way of flesh – it becomes nothing more than a self indulgent jam session that would have been better left in the rehearsal room. At least those bloody car insurance adverts consciously took him out of his comfort zone.
[2]
Katherine St Asaph: Lou recites his lyrics like a sci-fi heckler reads The Eye of Argon. Metallica plays accordingly.
[1]
Edward Okulicz: It’s pretty impressive how this record plays to neither of its artists’ strengths. I’ll admit my biases straight up: Metallica know how to make some great-sounding records, so I’m a little disappointed with how awful this sounds. The riffs don’t work, there’s no energy or sweat or sex; it’s a dry chug of a track and Reed doesn’t lubricate it any with his rant, which doesn’t work even slightly, even as a deliberate stream of unconsciousness. It’s loud but it doesn’t rock, it’s impenetrable but thoughtless, it’s ugly but not dangerous, and it’s portentous but it’s just embarrassing.
[0]
Zach Lyon: If you open a bad Metallica song in one window and a bad Lou Reed song in another, there’s still a 50% chance it’ll sound better than this.
[1]
Sally O’Rourke: A collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica might have meant something in 1986: the elder statesman and the up-and-comers, both in fertile periods, both avatars of different kinds of cool. Now, though, they’re just a pair of past-their-prime rock legends hashing out dry approximations of what made made them famous, like a more respectable Chickenfoot with artistic pretensions.
[3]