When S&M came out, I was in my 20s, I worked in a pub and I still had a reasonably full head of hair. I wondered why they chose the title at the time. Was it because James Hetfield liked to dress up in leather and smack a heavily restrained and ball gag-wearing Lars Ulrich across the buttocks with a plank of wood with a nail sticking out of it while yelling “FIRE WO-MAN!” at the top of his voice? Or was it just short for Symphony and Metallica? Probably the second. Or at least, something close to that.
Fast forward to today and S&M is 20 years old, I no longer work in a pub and I’m bald. Metallica could have just gone the cash-in route (again) and release a remastered version with bonus tracks in a box shaped like a guitar giving a cello a high five or something. But they didn’t.
Instead, they revisited the whole orchestral concept and released a completely new recording. Is it completely new though? Wasn’t it shown in selected cinemas last year?
No matter, S&M2 is the latest release from the non-stop thrash metal juggernaut which has managed to produce a whopping TEN studio albums in just under 40 years. Wow! Said no one, ever.
The album opens with an orchestra-only version of Ennio Morricone’s Ecstasy of Gold, the band’s intro music for as long as I can remember. Is it played a little bit slow though? Yes. Does that matter? Yes.
Straight into The Call of Ktulu (would you pick up if he rang?) and it’s like a copy and paste job of the original S&M. Faultless version though. Into track 3 and we see the first deviation from the original running order and For Whom the Bell Tolls gets an airing. Someone on Twitter described Ulrich’s drum fills on this version as “like someone falling down the stairs with a load of selection boxes”, but that’s perhaps a little harsh. We must remember that the former tennis-playing Dane is probably 60 by now. Imagine playing the drums at that age. I’ll think myself lucky if I can still wipe my own arse as a sexagenarian.
The Day That Never Comes sounds epic and The Memory Remains might be the only acceptable song from the Load era. Confusion and Moth into Flame represent the band’s newest album, Hardwired, and then quite inexplicably we’re “treated” to a near 10 minute version of The Outlaw Torn. Why was the outlaw torn anyway? Was he made of paper? Surely he’d be a rustler then? I’ll get me coat.
No Leaf Clover, a song I never warmed to the first time around, keeps things moving in the wrong direction and then Halo on Fire rounds off Act 1. So far so not-so-bad. At least the band and the orchestra sound like they’re playing from the same sheet this time. The original S&M had moments of brilliance, but vast sections where the orchestral parts simply didn’t match the guitar parts.
After the intermission, it’s straight on to disk 2. Lars Ulrich decides to introduce the San Francisco Symphony leader after identifying some flags correctly that fans were waving – why do people do this at music festivals, let alone gigs? (wave flags, that is, not identify them) the pricks – before telling us he “got good grades in geography back in the day.” I suspect he’d been drinking. The symphony guy sounds like he’s been drinking too, but he introduces the orchestra who play the Scythian Suite, possibly in an attempt to get metalheads more into classical music. I’m more bothered by the fact that the introduction speeches are over five minutes long and have their own track on the album.
Not all classical music is good, and this is a shining example of that, although it gets better after repeated listens. Next, the band join the orchestra for a collaborative version of The Iron Foundry by some Russian dude. Having not learned from the atrocity they recorded with Lou Reed, Metallica take another musical wrong turn here, proving that you can add an orchestra to metal but you can’t add metal to an orchestra.
Can they get back on track?
The Unforgiven III, the sequel which didn’t need to be made to a sequel which didn’t need to be made, gets an airing as a James’ vocals plus orchestra offering and it’s pretty good. The stripped-back style works very well. All Within My Hands is a better version than it was on St Anger, but they could’ve farted it and it would’ve been better.
Next up is an homage to Cliff Burton. His bass solo from the first album gets a strings tribute. Is it just one guy? Does Trujillo join in on the bass too? Not sure. I’d have to see the DVD to determine that. It sounds pretty good anyway, and if it is just one guy, how do you add distortion and wah-wah to a string instrument? But this is a fitting way to remember the man who was the real unsung hero of Metallica in the beginning and reminds us that, had he lived, there would probably have been no Load, Reload or St Anger. In a parallel universe, none of us know who Jason Newsted is and there’s actual audible bass on …And Justice for All.
There’s still 45 minutes left. Just enough time to rattle through classics Wherever I May Roam, One and Master of Puppets before the show-stopper Enter Sandman. Is Enter Sandman the best Metallica song? It’s the Guinness of Metallica songs. I’ve drunk thousands of Guinni and enjoyed the majority of them, but I wouldn’t say that any one of them was one of the single greatest moments of my life. What do I know though? It was their biggest chart success as a single and has nearly 550 million plays on Spotify. I’ve not drunk anywhere near that many pints of Guinness in my life.
Two and a half hours is a fairly impressive length of time for any band to play, let alone the biggest metal band on the planet. But that setlist though…
What would I have done differently? Well, I would have just had them play Kill ‘Em All in its entirety with selected songs from Lightning and Puppets chucked in at the end, and I’d have ditched the orchestra. But then, I’m a miserable bugger with a preference for the old school.
Other than that though, it’s alright.
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