Metallica, S&M2: Album review!

In 1999, Metallica played their highly praised S&M show, the band playing alongside the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. 20 years on from that and Metallica recorded a sequel to those shows, now titled S&M2, again with the same orchestra and featuring a mixture of songs performed the last time and new music that hadn’t even been written at the time of the first gig. Both shows were recorded both audibly and visually, and this last Friday the album of the second one was released. Being a HUGE Metallica fan, I'm excited to review this one!

Starting off by mirroring the previous show was a fantastic decision, in my opinion. Seeing the band live before myself, it is always captivating to hear Ennio Morricone's utterly fantastic Ecstasy of Gold being played before the band come on stage, but I imagine seeing it being played by an entire orchestra would most likely give me goosebumps. Then, to have the band themselves open on the instrumental Call of Ktulu, the same song as they did 20 years prior, was awesome. Immediately, the orchestra compliment James Hetfield's slower, clean riff perfectly, adding even more to the ambiance of the song. Even after it has kicked in, the orchestra really add to the song, here. However, the most praise I have to give this song is Rob Trujillo's playing and, even more so, his bass tone. He kills it in this song and at the times where his grungy bass tone can be heard over everything else going on it really becomes a highlight of the song for me.

Next up we get the ever popular For Whom the Bell Tolls. What immediately struck me about this song, however, was that it didn’t feel like there was quite as much audience interaction as I usually expect there to be from a Metallica live show. This was something I realised throughout the album, too, given that it takes James nearly 25 minutes to address the crowd at all, and there were a few songs that even in comparing back to the other S&M album (never mind one that didn’t have an orchestra present), there were much more points where he was encouraging the audience to chant or participate. There wasn’t a lot of that at all here. Having said that, though, James' voice still sounded just as powerful and on point as it has the last 30 years or so. It's pretty impressive, given his age and the fact that just a few weeks later the man would end up back in rehab due to an unfortunate alcohol addiction resurgence. The rest of the band sounded great again here, however I did feel like the orchestra was getting a little lost at times during this one.

One of my favourite 21st century Metallica songs is up next, 2008’s The Day that Never Comes. Immediately, the orchestra play the introduction that is usually played by the two guitars and I already love it. Unfortunately, they drop off a little too much for my liking in the verses, but they seem to make up for it during the heavier parts, surprisingly. It's at this point that I felt like the orchestra, or more so the composer of their parts, is being slightly more adventurous than they had been in the original series of shows, venturing away from following the guitar lines for a fair chunk of the album and doing their own thing. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t quite as much. If I’m honest, I felt like the orchestra added the most to the songs when it followed along to the solos or was unaccompanied. For instance, there is an insane bit in the last solo of this song where Kirk Hammett descends down the scale at a rapid pace and the strings follow him down. It sounded so incredible, one of the highlights of the whole album, even if it was just a couple of seconds long.

We finally get James saying a few words to the crowd before The Memory Remains. He thanks the crowd for being there, introduces the orchestra and asks the fans to keep up the energy and be loud. Of course they are, it's The Memory Remains. They even sing the outro for nearly two minutes after the song had finished. The crowd finally seemed into it, and as such the band seemed like they were loosening up a little and having more fun with it. A great song that was played well, with Kirk even sticking to the original solo for a change and blowing my mind because it's one of my favourite solos of all time when played like the track.

Now onto two of the few low points of the album, Confusion and Moth Into the Flame. Both are off the band's latest album, Hardwired... to Self-Destruct, and I am a fan of that album generally (although I thought Confusion was a low point of that album, anyway), but something here just didn’t work for me. There is nothing inherently wrong here, the songs translate well across from the album to a live show, but the orchestra felt like they had minimal involvement and influence here, and it made for a slightly dull 10 minutes or so, compared to a lot of the rest of the album.

They redeem themselves almost immediately, however, by playing Outlaw Torn. I cannot express to you how much I love this song. I'll get a lot of hate for this, but Load is even in my top three favourite Metallica albums, and I really wish they played more off it live. The band and the orchestra did this incredibly, both working together to play this nearly 10-minute masterpiece of a song. It feels and sounds epic and the orchestra really added to the ambiance, exactly what the collaboration was intended for in the first place.

What follows is another song they don’t play often enough live, though for better reason, No Leaf Clover. Originally written with the orchestra for the first S&M shows, it relies heavily on the symphonic backing, and even more so this time around with a short moment in the second chorus of just James and the orchestra. While I would still give the edge to the original recording over this one, this still ruled, and there isn’t too much more I can say about it!

Halo on Fire concludes the first half of the album. This was the most enjoyable Hardwired song by far, in my opinion, it fit in well among the other less heavy songs. After their intermission, the orchestra play two numbers written by classical composers, not the metal band. This is definitely not my area of expertise so I'll just say while it's not my thing, both pieces were interesting and clearly showed a lot of talent.

Here comes by far the highlight of the album, for me. They perform Death Magnetic’s Unforgiven III, but the whole song is just the orchestra and James' vocals. The vocals really have been a highlight of this whole album for me, the way they have worked alongside the orchestral backing is incredible. This whole song is beautiful, somehow even better than the awesome original version, and it really highlights the great lyrics even more. It gave me goosebumps so it must be good!

A controversial song next, as Metallica playing anything off their much-panned St Anger album would be. However, All Within my Hands is a definite highlight of that album, and they have been playing it great acoustically the last couple of years. That is no different here, the band rocking the acoustic guitars with some great backing by the symphony. A little more repetitive than other more liked Metallica songs from the gig, but it is still damn enjoyable.

Next comes something special. In another touching tribute to late and original Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, a member of the orchestra plays his signature solo song, (included on the band’s debut album), Anaesthesia (Pulling Teeth). It is performed exceptionally well, with the tone matching almost perfectly to Burton's old one. As a bassist myself and drawing a lot of inspiration personally from Burton, this was awesome.

Finally, towards the back end of the album, we get to just pure Metallica. I hate to lump all five songs together like this, but this review is pretty long anyway and there wasn’t really much variation between the album/original S&M versions on these tracks to really say much about them all individually. All five are classics and fan favourites live; Wherever I may Roam, One, Master of Puppets, Nothing Else Matters and finally Enter Sandman. All are utterly fantastic songs played amazingly by a band still going strong and putting on great live performances to this day, so there really isn’t much to talk about, bar a couple of minor things I heard and thought were odd. It took nearly all night but Kirk finally got too carried away with a solo, going well off the beaten path with how One's sounded on the original track. It was good, don’t get me wrong, but not as good as the original. And, for such an iconic solo, it might help to stick to it. It's fine though, James saved it somewhat with his epic solo to close out Nothing Else matters. However, speaking of that song, James pronouncing the word something as ‘sumting' constantly was oddly off-putting.

Overall, I loved this album. It isn’t quite as good as the first, but that may just be down to me being a bigger fan of the Load era stuff over the Hardwired and they played more of that stuff last time. Nostalgia may have even played a big part of it; I loved that first S&M album. But, make no mistake, it is still a great, wide variety of songs. I've seen a few people saying the sound or mixing was bad for this one, but I honestly didn’t hear that at all. I heard everything just fine throughout, it was on par, if not slightly better than the first in that regard. A great sounding live show that I wish I had the money to afford to have gone to while I was in the states last year, and listening through just makes me jealous now!

Overall: 7/10.