Lou Reed & Metallica

Some things enjoyable on their own are more interesting when combined. Chocolate and peanut butter are each separately delicious, but their synthesis is even better. Musical collaborations can provide the same kind of delight: Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s dual effort, is one of the best albums of the year. Lulu, a new release by Metallica and Lou Reed, is not. If Watch the Throne is a Reese’s peanut butter cup, Lulu is a chocolate-covered filet of salmon.

The result is unsurprising for a mismatch this severe. Former Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed is known for his discordant, Dylanesque singing, and his poetic approach to lyrics is alienated by Metallica’s heavy metal guitars. The two groups sound incredibly disjointed, as if Reed’s vocals were pasted over Metallica instrumentals as an afterthought; their simultaneous engagement is headache inducing.

The rare occasions that the album is listenable are concessions from one artist to another, like the 19-minute final track that mostly treads in soft-metal territory that invades Reed’s vocals a bit less. The incompatability of the artists thrusts the ridiculous lyrics into an unflattering spotlight. Many of the most bizarre lines result from Reed assuming the persona of Lulu, a woman whose identity is reduced to bizarre sexual imagery. On “Pumping Blood,” he sings, “I will swallow your sharpest cutter/Like a colored man’s d**k”. James Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica, also contributes his own brand of intolerableness to the project, repeating the phrase “small town girl” ad nauseam in the background on “Brandenburg Gate.”

Lulu was an experiment doomed to fail. Fans of Lou Reed or Metallica were unlikely to find common group in the first place, and logically, the album will satisfy none. To a certain extent, collaboration is a process of trial and error, but this experiment ranks alongside Stephen Colbert’s bacon-flavored mayonnaise.