In LULU, Lou Reed teams up with the world’s biggest heavy metal band to create an avant-garde theatrical soundtrack, an exercise that refers to his aim of combining rock music with (in his words) “the intelligence that once inhabited novels and film”. He’s achieved that objective with this album, although as a piece of listenable music it’s hardly an easy experience.
The inspiration is pure Reed. Frank Wedekind, a German pre-Expressionist playwright, kicked up plenty of controversy in the early 1900s with his plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, largely because they dealt with the colourful sexual desires of a young woman, Lulu, who is ultimately murdered by Jack The Ripper. The resulting combination of vivid bloodshed and miserable sex is the backdrop for these 10 songs, written by Reed for a recent US theatre production and beefed up by Metallica’s muscular, partly improvised accompaniment.
The initial impression is of an angry man speaking very loudly over abrasive grooves that go on for ages because no-one had the balls to tell the musicians to stop playing. If you’re not willing to make the effort to understand the concept, some of the lyrics sound banal. “Spermless like a girl!” shouts Lou repeatedly in Frustration, and in Cheat On Me he throws in amateurish rhymes such as “I have a passionate heart / It can tear us apart”. There is a limit beyond which clever just becomes silly, and we all know where that limit is.
Make the effort to understand the subject matter, though, and LULU begins to make a twisted kind of sense. Metallica’s unfettered jams ooze a sense of freedom, with fret-squeals and feedback all over the riffs. They switch between Sabbath-style drones (The View, Dragon) via intense, muddy thrash metal (Mistress Dread) and finally to atmospheric lounge on the 20-minute closer, Junior Dad. Strangely, this final, emotional composition sounds as if it comes from an entirely different album, ending with over 10 minutes of atonal but beautiful strings, which – according to reports from the studio – moved the members of Metallica to tears. LULU doesn’t really need to be an hour and a half long: most of the album’s second half could have been omitted and no-one would miss it. But you try telling that to Lou, Lars, James and the two outside producers.
The verdict? A meeting of very rich men in a studio with the intention of doing something intellectual and getting into art magazines at the same time. This album will sell a moderate number of copies, largely to Reed fans who will enjoy the chaos and intensity that Metallica bring to his lyrics. For the most part, however, Metallica fans will ignore it and play MASTER OF PUPPETS instead.
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