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

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

Lulu brings back Metallica in a collaboration album with Lou Reed. A German visionary named Frank Wedekind wrote a collection of plays about a woman called Lulu who was both a muse and a mystery, the first form of woman. Most of the songs have death, sexuality, love and spite themes. Although it's not a Metallica album, the expectation was off the charts but the result is terrible.

This album is really bad so I'll start instantly with the review. The collaboration with Lou Reed just doesn't combine both James and Lou Reed voices very well, as they don't match, and makes most of the songs a real torment to hear. The best thing taken off this album is the good performance by both Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo. Most of the songs need a strong and heavy musical pace. That's why in my opinion Robert and Kirk perform pretty well and way better than the rest of the members. James Hetfield tries and puts in a heroic effort but there are so many songs where his voice doesn't match with Lou Reed's and that's, like I said before, not pretty.

The first and only single was "The View" and, although I heard really bad reviews about that song, I enjoyed it. Again the combination with the instrumentalists of Metallica and voice of Lou Reed is disappointing and, may I say, something I was expecting in this collaboration. Still it's not a bad track and is probably the best song of this album. Alongside "The View", "Iced Honey" is a really good song not for 80s Metallica or a good album of Lou Reed but it's a great track, very easy to hear with simple rock features. Simplicity is the main characteristic that makes this song great; they don't try anything magnificent. The rest of the songs came to me as really disappointing and horrible. Some of them seem badly written and badly arranged. "Junior Dad" was the one I wanted to hear after knowing about the strong emotional feature this song was supposed to have before Lulu was released. "Junior Dad" is way too repetitive and technically speaking is a 3/10. Another example is "Pumping Blood" that is really confusing, starts with violins and continues with power with Lars Ulrich, Lou Reed and Kirk as the main characters in this song. In the middle of the song it stops and starts really strong, so strong that two minutes to the end it seems we are listening to Slayer with really fast drum pieces and heavy guitar parts. The rest of the songs aren't worth listening to or even speaking about.

This album has really bad components with no good parts. It was a bad idea, this collaboration interrupting the good wave of support Metallica were having with Death Magnetic, after releasing albums that almost finished with their fan base. I hope the REAL album is way different from this sample of Metallica.