Band:	Metallica
Album:	Lulu [Collaboration]
Style:	Alternative metal
Release date:	October 31, 2011
A review by:	Daniell

Disc I
01. Brandenburg Gate
02. The View
03. Pumping Blood
04. Mistress Dread
05. Iced Honey
06. Cheat On Me

Disc II
01. Frustration
02. Little Dog
03. Dragon
04. Junior Dad

Some people righteously claim that this is not a real Metallica release and thus it can't be viewed as such. I agree. Metallica decided to co-operate with Lou Reed in his interpretation of Alban Berg's opera based on Frank Wedekind's plays "Erdgeist" and "Die Büchse der Pandora". The history behind that opera is as complicated and dramatic as one can imagine, assuming what a dark story it tells.

But it all bears no significance at all. An ordinary listener will not give a damn about the literary predecessor that became grounds for this album. All an ordinary listener cares about is the music. And this is what is the biggest failure here. A gargantuan failure of biblical proportions. A debacle of misbegotten notions. A hapless heap of humungous refuse. Even the Apocalypse of John doesn't depict an event as catastrophic as this brainfart committed by a bunch of pretentious musicians and their misguided greed for mainstream recognition.

There isn't much to say about the music here. Metallica plods along with some recycled riffs (or lack thereof, see "Junior Dad"), boring drumming and generic singing, all that hidden ten fathoms under Lou Reed's mumbling. The mumbling that is so incredibly annoying, that I feel like shooting myself so that I can never hear it again.

Creating a piece of art isn't a conscious process. You sit down, write music, jam with your fellow bandmates, then record your endeavors, and if the general public, the history and fate decide that your work was brilliant, that it's a paragon of genius for generations to come, it will be so. But you can't calculate it. To me this is what Metallica and Lou Reed did. Tried to do. Failed miserably. Nuked all that remained of any shred of respect any fan could have for them. Genius arises by the way, not by calculation. How the fuck would they know that anyway.

Forgive lack of down-to-earth dissertation of the music. Forgive the dissonant style of this review. Only two things can make me write such a rant. Either utter genius or utter shitfest at the bottom of the cesspool of miscarried intentions. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which was the case this time.