METALLICA & LOU REED: LULU

Lou Reed has crafted a masterful, finely-produced concept album which is inspired by the German expressionism of the inter-war period and updates those ideas for the modern day, backed by a competent backing band of highly capable musicians who expertly bring his ideas to life.

That album is called "Berlin", he put it out in 1973 and it's really quite excellent.

Lulu, on the other hand, wow. A lot of words have been written, spoken, and yelled about Lulu from the point of view of it being a Metallica album - and as far as Metallica albums go, it's pretty poor - but I want to spend a little time to speak about it from the perspective of a Lou Reed fan. As I outline above, the album occupies territory which Lou has already covered, and covered more than adequately over the course of his solo career. The fact that he is choosing to revisit it with Metallica only shows how short on ideas the guy is these days. (His other most recent endeavour? Trying to put across the idea that the Metal Machine Music album was a serious artistic statement and touring with a trio playing similar noise. Sorry Lou, the noise rock bandwagon already left you in the dust.)

I love him for the contributions he made to proto-punk and glam back in the day, but the fact is that he just can't cut it as a lyricist or a singer any more. Putting him front of Metallica only makes these problems even more blindingly obvious than they already are.