Listening to S & M<\/i>, the pairing of heavy metal band Metallica with the San Francisco Symphony, I am reminded of a line from the movie Jurassic Park<\/i>: \u201cYour scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could<\/i> that they didn\u2019t stop to think if they should<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reading that, a diehard Metallica fan might immediately say, \u201cOh, he\u2019d never like the album in a million years, since he was already biased against combining the two.\u201d Wrong\u2026 I never said that. In fact, if you listen to some of Metallica\u2019s work over the years, you could almost hear a full orchestra filling in some of the details in the music that, quite honestly, two guitars, bass and drums can\u2019t cover on their own.<\/p>\n
But this\u2026<\/i> this would be the equivalent of planning to masturbate to a picture of Marilyn Monroe, but all you could find was one of Phyllis Diller. Everything was there that needed to be, but the final result was disheartening.<\/p>\n
Me? I actually absolve James Hetfield and crew from any of the blame this time around. They\u2019re obviously more than adequate at what they do, and you still hear the cores of most of Metallica\u2019s classic songs hidden behind layers of orchestrated nonsense. And, in the past they have worked snippets of symphonic sounds into their music\u2014see \u201cNothing Else Matters\u201d as a prime example of how this can<\/i> work. (And, as noted in other works, the seed for such a concert was planted by none other than the late Cliff Burton, who had a healthy appreciation for classical music.)<\/p>\n
No\u2026 the blame goes to Michael Kamen. Admittedly, his pedigree was top notch; he had worked with such artists as Pink Floyd, Queen, Aerosmith, Bryan Adams and Guns N\u2019 Roses (though I still maintain a stripped-down version of \u201cNovember Rain\u201d I first heard on a bootleg kicked the orchestrated version\u2019s ass). It almost feels like Kamen saw this as his grandest opportunity to shine on a big stage\u2014never mind all the success and acclaim he had earned to that point.<\/p>\n
And\u2014at least at the beginning\u2014it seems like it\u2019s going to be a good idea. \u201cThe Call Of Ktulu\u201d is one such track that was begging for additional instrumentation (although the original version on Ride The Lightning<\/i> is hardly a slouch). There\u2019s a good reason why this particular song won a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, this is where S & M<\/i> kinda loses its direction. There never seems to be a line of demarcation that allows each musical entity to shine on their own merits within a song. Granted, it wasn\u2019t expected that the orchestra would simply sit on their hands while Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Jason Newsted and Lars Ulrich made the plaster crack in the ceiling with the intensity. However, more often than not, it seems like Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony are each going balls to the wall, trying to outdo the other with their intensity. \u201cOne,\u201d for example, becomes an absolute sonic blur, which undoes any of the power the original song had.<\/p>\n
The thing is, S & M<\/i> wasn\u2019t a bad idea; in fact, the concept has<\/i> worked in the past. The Moody Blues did it with their Days Of Future Past<\/i> album; Deep Purple integrated symphonies with some of their work over the years. So, a collaboration between Metallica and a symphony orchestra wasn\u2019t such a crazy idea. If anything, hearing efforts like \u201cFuel,\u201d \u201cWherever I May Roam\u201d and \u201cEnter Sandman\u201d in all their bombasity undoes the progress heard in tracks like \u201cBleeding Me\u201d or \u201cUntil It Sleeps.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s where I blame Kamen. He needed to dial his orchestrations down and should have written the parts so that both Metallica and orchestra could have better reconciled their performances. As it exists, it sometimes feels like two freight trains constantly colliding into each other\u2014and while there are moments where the collaborations work, overall it\u2019s sonically overpowering.<\/p>\n
Metallica would take another stab at such a pairing 20 years later\u2026 but that\u2019s a review for another day. (The one clip I\u2019ve seen for \u201cAnethesia \u2013 Pulling Teeth\u201d fills me with hope that they got it right the second time around.) S & M<\/i> was admittedly a lofty pursuit for Metallica, but in the end, proves to be a live gig with a lot of other additional noise that doesn\u2019t necessarily have to be there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[5706],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-46793","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-metallica","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46793"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}