Title:Metal Machine Music
Artiste: Lou Reed
Genre: Noise
Evil Bastard: Frownland
Ah, so here we go then. The apex of my musical fears, the beast that crouches in shadows waiting to eat my entrails, the album that has prompted one reviewer to pray for the soul of the engineer who had to sit through its recording. Enough to make strong men wet themselves and even turn the most hardened metalhead to jelly; an album to send sane men screaming for the exits and which is rumoured to have been responsible for more than one nervous breakdown. Perhaps. Surely this will be then the one which defeats me, and makes me the first to pussy out by not listening to it all the way? It only has four tracks but they're all sixteen minutes long, so let's see how far we can get through this.
Well that's a surprise. Far from the discordant, formless cacophony of pointless feedback sound I had expected, I can actually pick out some melody here as the first track begins! Admittedly, I'm only thirty seconds in but still I'm not screaming yet. I can definitely hear the cadences of music in this, sort of like an orchestra composed only of guitars tuning up before the performance. Two minutes in and still okay. It also kind of sounds like there is some sort of vocal chorus of guitars going and I can hear different things happening. It's not something I'd listen to for fun, but it's no Merzbow that's for sure. My ears remain intact and it's not at all like nails on a blackboard as I had expected. I'm quite cautiously optimistic about this, and I had no idea I would be.
Into the second track now with something that sort of sounds like bagpipes. Completely surprising myself, I'm quite enjoying this now, and may end up having to properly review it in some depth down the road. For now though, it's a whole lot more pleasant and easy to listen to than I ever expected it to be. If this is seriously just guitars in front of amps, Reed is making the sound of bells, pianos, whistles, chimes and a whole lot more with just these two workhorses. Really ****ing impressive. The amount of reverb, echo, fade, tremelo, whatever-the-****-you-guitarists-call-it here is amazing. It's kind of fading out halfway through track two but now coming back with an almost steam engine sound and horns. I can see why this is so respected, and from the outside that would never have been the case. Sort of like ambulance sirens now, though still amazingly tuneful.
If I had to describe this to someone who had not heard it, this is how I would do it: it's like having one of those old radios that you could tune to a lot of weird stations, but tip the dial very slightly and you were kind of in limbo, with the sound of the station you were closest to just kind of ghosting in; you could hear it but not quite make it out. That's what this sounds like: being just on the verge of being able to hear a really great guitar symphony but just slightly out of phase with the transmission. I like this more as it goes on, and now into track three. It's kind of hard to write anything descriptive, as there are definitely sounds, harmonics, melodies, ideas, tunes even, but it's all much more melodic than I expected. I thought I'd get hit in the face by a big screaming screech of feedback that would basically go on for four tracks, and that wasn't what happened at all.
That was much, much more pleasant than I expected, and my biggest positive shock since “enduring” Gnaw Their Tongues. I thought this would be the one to make me be the first to stop at least halfway, but I made it all the way through.
