This is a 90 minute collection of music that comes out next week. I have listened to it a few times all the way through via ear buds and car stereo. I don't like Metallica. I don't have anything against them, but I just have never gotten any sort of charge from their product. I do love much of Lou Reed's work, though not all of it. I have seen a few reviews of this current release, and have yet to read anything truly positive. That's what inspired me to write this.
Lulu is brilliant. Both acts bring their respective skills to bear with moving results. These pieces are character and situational studies. Spoken free verse poetry and metal riffing come together as you would expect from these artists, and there is much going on here that provokes an emotional reaction in me. The characters are sick, the situations are violent and amoral. Sex and pain. Need and conflict. It is necessarily harsh. Lou comes off like a beat poet at times, James Hetfield growls and shouts, Ulrich pounds, Hammett wails as expected. My only complaint is that 'Junior Dad' could have been edited back a bit.
The surprise is in the emotive results. It trips my trigger many times. I dated a girl who could have been the voice of "The View". I know a few "Junior Dad"s. These are characters and situations that speak to my reality. The musical techniques and technical specifics of the sounds fall by my wayside in the face of these emotional connections. I don't know how these men did this, I just know it hits me. It hits me over and over again.
These characters and situations feel real and horrifying to me. I hear people without morals, unashamedly telling us about their love for each other. It feels like the darkness that I have lived and strive to escape.
But it is not a party album. Don't expect a Metallica kinda feeling, because it is not here.
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