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Lou Reed and Metallica : Lulu

Warner Brothers

There’s that Simpsons episode where there’s a montage of Mr. Burns cracking up continuously for several decades about the time that he ran over somebody with a bumper car. “What I was laughing about again?” he wonders near the end. “Ah, yes, that crippled Irishman,” he remembers, and falls back into hysterics. Lulu, Lou Reed’s collaborative album with Metallica—based, naturally, on racy German plays—might provoke a similar response in rock fans. It is unquestionably a singular recording that ranks in a career of progressively ridiculous Reed shock-moves including drugs (“Heroin”), bisexuality (“Walk on the Wild Side”), wild feedback ( Metal Machine Music ), hip-hop (“The Original Wrapper’) and Edgar Allan Poe tributes ( The Raven ). For all of that, it’s better than one might expect. “Iced Honey” is an easy greatest hit, arguably better than anything since 1989’s New York. Mostly, the two discs are next level WTFs, like the thrashing babble of “Dragon.” But when they chill out, and James Hetfield doesn’t bellow too much, something else happens. “Little Dog”—acoustic guitar over scorched feedback—is Reed’s own Berlin-twisted version of the dismal hinterlands of Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his own late career reinvention. For the 69-year-old Reed, that might not be a bad place to be.