However no sooner have you bashed said button than you're wanting to thrust forth a finger with the vigour of a rabid terrace hooligan and kill it off. Brandenburg Gate opens up with the lyric: "I would cut my legs and tits off" and while experiencing any 69-year-old man croaking such confused vulgarity over disastrously wayward acoustic strum would prove disquieting in the extreme, when it represents the sound of Reed sullying his once-esteemed legacy, it's downright depressing. He continues: "When I think of Boris Karloff and Kinski / In the dark of the moon" and at merely thirty seconds in, an already indelible grimace like that of Robert Trujillo when blurting out a wall of bass rumble is smeared across the face. Then a stodgy, second-rate riff barely worthy of Death Magnetic is aroused, James Hetfield uncontrollably yowling: "Small town girl". Metallica have announced their arrival in typically brazen, balls-out fashion, and sound as though they're acquainted with Reed for the very first time in their history. From here on in, vocally, the record is a mixture of Reed and Hetfield singing lyrics as they see fit, seemingly without even the slightest previous consultation, and Reed doing his best (if deplorable) impression of Hetfield. The View follows, and kickstarts with a sluggish, almost proggish progression reminiscent of Black Sabbath's Iron Man, Reed slurring of "the purity of love" and belching similar clichés regarding the dichotomy between business, pleasure, and inevitable attachment that affronts the much-lambasted figure of the prostitute of centuries past, present, and future. Hetfield then makes some bizarre parallel with Moses atop Mount Sinai ("I am the tablet / These ten stories"), possibly in reference to the ten interminable tracks here compiled. Needless to say there's nothing ethical nor worthy of any form of worship to hear here.
Pumping Blood commences with discordant string harmony courtesy of orchestral arranger Jenny Scheinman, before any harmony is unceremoniously shredded by further distortion. Musically, despite once again pertaining to quite prog-like tendencies, there's no progression throughout as the track goes nowhere and hellishly so while lyrically, it's another lowlight from Reed, as he rasps: "If I waggle my ass like a dark prostitute / Would you think less of me". Perhaps the only reason worth seeing this horror show live (if it's ever deemed worthy of staging) would be to see Reed rabidly wiggle his derrière thus. By the time he's blathering about "a colored man's dick" all attention has all but disintegrated. Mistress Dread is insufferably relentless, Reed struggling to detect any musicality in the double bass drum onslaught that he's (seemingly almost obliviously) fronting, before the comparatively mellifluous Iced Honey intervenes. On any other record it'd maybe sound dated and dire yet here, lodged in this mire of the outwardly chthonian, it sounds like a roughened gem. Obviously nothing like a gem unearthed from The Velvet Underground and at one point it sounds as though Reed attempts to mimic the vocal harmony of Coldplay's woeful Politik, but comparatively, it's a crunchy, oozy opus. Cheat On Me sees out CD1 with experimental stridency that's caught somewhere between The Dirty Three and Metal Machine Music, and rattles along quite well until Hetfield pukes gravel and grunt all over it.
CD2, superficially, seems as though it'll be hard work: at only four tracks, it manages to clock in at just shy of the fifty-minute mark. Scratch beneath the surface and it's the same hue of murky crimson running through its heart: Frustration is, again, just that, Reed wittering of feeling "dry and spermless like a girl"; the fire and furnace of Dragon is momentarily listenable, sounding capable of singeing any speaker through which it is breathed, although in keeping with the common theme, seems unending. Indeed, by the time the pseudo-epic Junior Dad comes around, ready to linger for another exasperating twenty minutes, all recollections of the original concept have evaporated entirely leaving, as Reed meekly puts it around the midpoint, "the greatest disappointment". Given the great pain and suffering of our prostituted protagonist, perhaps Lulu was always supposed to sound this excruciating, this grim and grotesque. However if Reed views this 'project' as the "best thing I ever did", the screws are evidently looser than the limbs of the dismembered dummy on its cover.
