Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [205]
Kamen studied Metallica’s music for six months – the equivalent, he reckoned, of completing three movie soundtracks – scoring arrangements for twenty-one of their songs, including two new Hetfield/Ulrich compositions, ‘No Leaf Clover’ and ‘Human’. There had been an initial rehearsal with the SFSO’s principal players, followed by two lengthy rehearsals with both band and full orchestra, for which harpist Douglas Rioth arrived on a motorcycle, his tattooed arms clutching some Metallica CDs he would ask them to sign. ‘There’s also [some] snotty old bastards giving you the evil eye, like, “Fuck, you guys are cavemen. Your music sucks,”’ complained James. ‘But there were others that understood what we were trying to do; they could see that we fucking mean this shit, man. We have a passion in our music and our music is our life. They just grew up learning it different. They studied theory and we studied UFO Live.’ The show itself was also filmed, and later released on DVD. To promote the album and DVD, Metallica also performed single concerts with orchestras in Berlin and New York. Questioned after the Berlin show, however, James laughed it off. When they were first presented with the idea, he said, ‘We thought, “Fuck, that’s got failure written all over it. It’s like fucking in church. Let’s do it!”’ Playing down the whole thing still further, he added: ‘It would be fun to take [the orchestra] on tour and watch them fall into the debauchery hole and completely turn into rock ruins. Taking them on the road and watching one beer turn into five beers and all of a sudden they’re in jail, divorced and hooked on heroin and smashing their cellos onstage.’
Presented in yet another Airfix-designed package, replete with by-now-obligatory Corbijn photos, the whole was decidedly under-whelming once the novelty had worn off. As always there were highlights – the grand rendering of the instrumental ‘The Call of Ktulu’ (misremembered on the new CD booklet as ‘The Call of the Ktulu’) is breathtaking, as is the reworked Morricone opening, ‘The Ecstasy of Gold’. The two new songs – ‘No Leaf Clover’ and ‘Human’ – are also impressive, both more genuinely experimental than anything from the Load/Reload period; the latter a swaggering, emotional trial by fire with band and orchestra meshing to spectacular effect; the former a sweeping, atmospheric piece that somehow allows oboe and keyboards to sit snugly alongside the explosive guitars, drums and treated vocals. The remaining seventeen tracks, however, merely highlight what an odd, difficult fit the two highly emotive forms of music make. ‘One’ sounds neutered; ‘Enter Sandman’ simply a mess. Even something like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ – Kamen’s original entry point into the band’s music – sounds lacklustre, perfunctory. Others, such as ‘Hero of the Day’, work better but only because the orchestra tends to stay more in the background. Ultimately, what may well have been a unique live experience becomes, on record and DVD, little more than a home movie: fascinating, no doubt, for those who were there, but something that doesn’t stand up to repeated listening/viewing for the rest of us. It couldn’t even be argued this time that Metallica had shrewdly judged the market; this was a package seemingly designed to please no one: not hardcore metal fans nor the nu-generation of Limp Bizkit and Slipknot fans then rising to challenge their superiority, just as the grunge stars had done nearly a decade before.
Reviews were upbeat if somewhat lukewarm. In Britain, Q was avuncular, describing it as ‘another just about forgivable flirtation with Spinal Tap-esque lunacy’. Rolling Stone claimed the album ‘creates