Shit That’s Good! Crap Albums I Love # 58 – Lou Reed and Metallica, Lulu

From time to time I like to share some stories about albums I love that are duds – either I’ve found a way in to appreciate it through sheer stubbornness – or I just loved it on first listen

Lou Reed and Metallica, Lulu, 2011

I have decided, only fairly recently by the way, that I kinda do love this album. I hated it when it was released. But not for the reasons that most people seemed to. Weirdly, a bunch of people seemed to think that some old spoken-word guy had made Metallica a bit shit. Mate, they’d been making themselves sound shit for pretty much 20 years when this album was released. If anything, Lou was the saving grace here.

I hated it because I wanted The Exact Same Album to exist, but with Sonic Youth backing Lou. Surely, that would have absolutely slayed. Lou’s almost approaching some of his VU pretentiousness here. And SY would have approximated the sound, or at the least they would have been able to actually, you know, improvise. If you’re playing at home, I would also have accepted the answer: Yo La Tengo.

But no. We got Lars and James and crew. And how that happened is really a giant Fuck Knows for the ages, right?

The other HUGE issue with this album is its enormous length, if not girth. A double album that’s swollen to some 87 minutes. No, no. That’s doing nothing good. Pick the eyes out of it and you might have something.

I suddenly feel the very weird need to defend this ever so slightly shit-as-fuck album! I hated the meme-ification where people that had never really ever heard Lou Reed were laughing at the “I am the table!” line — like it was that that was somehow the problem. That’s one of the best songs on this damn thing.

Lars only being able to play one beat is more the problem. Lars’ bass drum sounding like a wet cardboard box, or, like milk bottle tops popping off…that is more the problem if anything. James not knowing really what to do is also part of the problem. Robert being entirely the wrong bass player for anything Lou Reed is doing is also a part of the problem.

At the time I’m sure I felt this was an appalling swan song for Reed, but it’s actually strangely fitting. It’s as baffling in 2011 (and even in 2024) as The Velvet Underground & Nico must have been in 1967 and at various points since. It doesn’t have any of the appeal of that magical record of course. It’s more stubborn. And in that sense, closer, if anything to White Light/White Heat, and in Reed’s own canon it’s really closest to both Metal Machine Music and The Bells, with The Raven for a third.

But on reflection he sounds urgent, wired up, and well, weird. And he was fucking weird. I’ve been working back through his catalogue — from VU all the way through — and the consistency he offered was a weirdness. Even when he went mainstream pop in the 80s, or tried. That too, for then, and in the way he attempted it, was weird.

When I got over the silliness of Metallica improvising, and how blunt and boring and rudimentary their “compositions” were, and how it should have been Yo La, or Sonic Youth, or shit, even the Flaming Lips, well, look, it’s also weirdly some of Metallica’s best attempts at getting back to some of the fire they can maybe still offer. A Metallica fan wouldn’t think so. But Metallica fans are to blame for this whole mess anyway, whichever way you slice it. And their level of frustration at this as a product, at the thought that it was Reed that did it to them, not them that did it to him is undeniable the fucking issue.

That and the fact that there are too many songs, and too many of them are too long. And there’s no way to really get a handle on any of this.

Look, apart from those small things, it’s fine. Just fine.

I mean listen.

A decade and change on, the opening cut utterly fucking slaps. My favourite thing about this album is that it’s best when it seems like Lou and Metallica are playing two entirely different songs at the very same time. That of course used to be what I utterly hated about this.

I reckon Pumping Blood — or parts of it — is about the last time Metallica sounded almost like themselves. Or at least in a good way:

I mean this is a shit album. And that’s what this column is about. It’s really the fact that I can now — mostly — celebrate it. Bask in it. I purposely held off revisiting Lulu for the longest time. Because, shit, that fucking beastly length and the stupidity of most of it. But I don’t know. I like how Lou was a cantankerous wanker. And you can’t say he’s not being both of those things right here. We went out swinging for the fences. Good fucking on him.

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This started a while back when I had my Off The Tracks site, there’s over 50 for you to look through in the back-pages of this here Substack newsletter: