Conquistador this ain’t.
Sure, like that Procol Harum chestnut from back in the ’70s, Metallica’s new double-CD S&M — get your mind out of the gutter, it stands for Symphony and Metallica — teams a rock band with a full-fledged orchestra. But trust me, the resemblance begins and ends there.
Procol Harum’s 1972 collaboration with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra was a well-mannered progressive-rock affair — one can almost imagine the longhairs and the society types nodding approval at the music and each other. But Bay Area foursome Metallica’s recent two-night stand with the hometown San Francisco Symphony, as chronicled here, seems the musical equivalent of an iron man competition: Two powerhouse outfits pushing themselves to the limit for two hours, with neither side willing to drop the ball in front of the other.
Or course, that sort of uncompromising behaviour is par for the course with Metallica, who have pushed the boundaries of heavy metal throughout their 15-year career. Emerging to the strains of Ennio Morricone’s Ecstasy Of Gold — fitting intro music for a pack of hell-bent-for-leather gunslingers — guitarists James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett, bassist Jason Newsted and drummer Lars Ulrich bulldoze their way through a 20-song set, pulling tunes from every stage of their career: Early scorchers like Master Of Puppets and Battery; mid-period epics like One and The Thing That Should Not Be; recent crowd-pleasers such as Enter Sandman and Sad But True; and two new tracks, the wintry ballad No Leaf Clover and the midtempo brooder Human.
True, the set does skew slightly toward their slower, moodier material. But musically, the rockers give no quarter to the tuxedo-clad accompanists, thrashing out just as long, hard and loud as they would at any stadium show, practically daring them to keep up or give up.
But the 90-something-piece orchestra and conductor Michael Kamen are no pushovers. S&M isn’t some tossed-off affair where they just sweeten the melodies with strings or double the rhythm guitar lines. Metallica’s complex, majestic tunes lend themselves to some serious orchestration, and indeed, Kamen spent more than a year orchestrating the pieces, adding new counter-melodies, musical themes and sonic textures.
Not to mention plenty of sheer bombast and power. If there’s any musical aggregation that can approach the sonic fury of a heavy metal band, it’s a full orchestra firing on all cylinders. Taken in tandem here, it’s an awesome sound to behold — massive, dynamic, richly textured and relentlessly intense. This is the sound Wagner would have produced if he had a Marshall stack, a Stratocaster and a pedal board.
You can only imagine what he — or Metallica — could have done to Conquistador.
