Lou Reed – Metal Machine Music Review

What you need more than anything in the cold, winter nights, is an hour of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. Either it’ll provide odd comfort to your surroundings or make them feel much better because you realise nothing could be worse than this aggressive soundboard. But Metal Machine Music falls into the same category as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music project. You can engage with the avant-garde as far as you’re willing to accept it, screams, sirens, and scratching horrors included. Push through that and you can find the message is far stronger, obviously, than the music. Subverting expectations is what Reed does here and it was an aim of his career for much of his time in The Velvet Underground and long after, too. If you liked his Metallica collaboration, Lulu, a truly solid piece of work which left a sour taste in the mouths of rock and roll listeners, you may find yourself with a soft spot for Metal Machine Music, too.  

Two main pointers for Metal Machine Music, then. It’s a surprisingly effective listen for when you need to focus on a mind-numbing task, for the noise will numb it for you, and the intent of the release, rather than the release itself, is the talking point Reed offers here. Metal Machine Music is not an album that’s going to keep much of its charm for an hour-long listen, but it is a patience-testing experience. It’s meant to be, after all. Droning, whining static from those metallic machines is what Reed wanted to capture here, and he does just that. Effectiveness does not mean sonic satisfaction, not for the avant-garde experience. How much of that you buy into is how much you’ll enjoy Metal Machine Music, though even this take-no-prisoners attitude Reed deploys is rough. There is no contemplation from Reed, he has turned that to us and offered us an hour-long experience to do just that. 

Feedback and noise to drill into your brain and quieten other thoughts. For some, this will be a sincerely helpful album, and for others it will make them question the purpose of Reed’s music-making. In turning the creativity and contemplation on an audience, is Reed not proposing an anti-art rhetoric? No. The art is in empowering the listener with thoughts of their own, feeding the album themselves, the never-satisfied machine, with their own thoughts and feelings. Musicians did the same around the time of this release and still do now. We wait for crumbs to tumble down through a crack in the floor of the recording studio and make the most of this meal. Interpretation, experience, it all feels pulled apart and projected on. Why bother making a sincere experience when you can just give the listener what they want? A place for them to figure out their own feelings.  

The same way water is used as a palette cleanser between meals, so too is Metal Machine Music as a break from sound. We are all too encompassed in the noise of the day, to spend an hour with nothing but a hard reset is something of a miracle. Look at it as conventional music and, naturally, there is little to pull from Metal Machine Music. The rating must reflect that. But look around the edges of it, not at the project but the making of it and the impact, and you can find a sincerity within which affects all of Reed’s work. Where it may not make it into the surface-level listening experience, tackling Metal Machine Music, despite its reputation, is worth it. Like Lulu, it has been misaligned so heavily on first release that few are willing to return to it.