Lou Reed and Metallica
Lulu
(Warner Bros./Vertigo)

In the most unlikeliest pairing since Phil Collins and Bone Thugs N’ Harmony (or, perhaps, Orson Welles and Manowar?), Velvet Underground stalwart Lou Reed teams up with the biggest riff factory known to mankind, Metallica. Metalheads and old rockers alike waited with baited breath for the first samples to appear online and both were roundly disgusted at what they heard (it takes a lot to disgust a metalhead, especially these days). Now that the monstrosity is here, requiring two discs to soundly contain all of Reed’s bewildering homespun ramblings and Metallica’s laborious, repetitive riffs  — both of which announce themselves from the outset in opener 'Brandenburg Gate' — one quickly discovers stapling together rock legends does not a great record guarantee.

When Reed rattles off the weathered lyric “Someone who actively despises you” for the seventieth time on second track ‘The View’, I could be counted chiefly among those legions. This sludgy, molasses-thick dirge swiftly grows tiresome and one has to wonder as we’re blasted by unconvincingly gruff bellows - is Reed aping Hetfield or vice-versa? Curiously, as the distorted violins and middle-order chugging form a backdrop to ‘Pumping Blood’, one starts to notice the clarity of a production that highlights the crispness of Reed’s daft poetry (his slurred rambling sounding like the improvised verse of a drunken philosophy major) and the blunt instrumentals on offer from the usually astute and muscular Metallica. It's not until fourth track, ‘Mistress Dread’, that we finally hear some actual thrash metal. Pounding rhythms dominate as Reed lethargically proselytizes like he’s wandered aimlessly into a downtown recording studio in his pajamas.

In fact, for the most part Metallica seem content to joylessly churn like stolid machinery, until the thing billows smoke and breaks from exhaustion. There’s a shade of stiff radio-friendly (read: metalhead unfriendly) post-grunge heard on ‘Iced Honey’; very much de rigueur shoegaze textures meander throughout the beginning of ‘Cheat on Me’, but after three minutes of its eleven minute length, it feels assembled by committee, with Hetfield and Reed warbling out of key (and out of time) in the refrain. Swagger abounds on ‘Frustration’ but it too outstays its welcome -- not helped by Reed’s un-ironic pleas for marriage imparting all the charisma of a brown paper bag.

There are long tranches of ambience that are abruptly shaken out of a stupor by trademark Metallica stomp ('Dragon'), but ultimately it's too little too late. In the near twenty-minute closer ‘Junior Dad’, the laughable, atonal phrasing of Reed reaches its irritating crescendo as Metallica recycles '90s indie rock writ large before Reed and co. depart for a holiday without warning, leaving the string section to de-tune for ten unfathomable minutes.

“This has so much rage, it’s thrilling,” Reed told the Guardian in a recent interview. Sure; there’s evidence of angst-tinctured, chunky meat and potato riffs that lent to Metallica’s esteem throughout their career but Lulu is largely devoid of their signature implosive character and perhaps consequently, Reed is also drained of his own; sounding out of his own depth; doddering and a pale shade of the rock legend we’ve come to revere. Reed, again in the Guardian also said the odds of the three guitars of Reed, Hetfield and Hammet working in unison working were “almost zero.” He was almost right.

Tom Valcanis