For the first 11 minutes, Metallica’s S&M2 is almost completely indistinguishable from its predecessor. There’s the slow fade-in on the sound of applause and the ominous opening arpeggio of “The Ecstasy of Gold,” the soaring Ennio Morricone film cue that has opened Metallica concerts since 1983. Next, the furious instrumental “The Call of Ktulu,” with a string section whipping at the band like crosswinds battering a ship. You might check to make sure you didn’t load up the original S&M, a 1999 live album documenting a pair of collaborative concerts with the San Francisco Symphony, which opens with the same one-two punch. But you’ll be relieved to reach track three, a majestically blown-out rendition of the 1984 classic “For Whom The Bell Tolls”—not that it didn’t appear in essentially the same arrangement on S&M, but on that album it was track 14.
So it goes with much of S&M2, recorded live with the San Francisco Symphony in September 2019. Of the 20 pieces of music here, more than half appeared in a similar form more than two decades ago on the first S&M. One of the new tracks consists of the orchestra playing a movement from Prokofiev’s “Scythian Suite”—introduced by SFS music director Michael Tilson Thomas earnestly explaining why the piece reminds him of heavy metal—without Metallica’s involvement at all. It is difficult to fathom for whom this album is an exciting prospect. In a different speech, also left on the record for no clear reason, drummer Lars Ulrich spends a minute and a half shouting out the members of the Metallica Club in attendance at the show (“I see our Polish friends over here…”), emphasizing the notion that this is for fans only. But any fan deep enough to be interested in S&M2 has surely heard S&M already.
For attendees of the concerts themselves, who may have loved the original S&M, the setlist similarities were probably not a problem. But as a recorded statement, S&M2 is eerie, almost pathological in its attempts to recreate an album that was never a major entry in Metallica’s canon in the first place. If you’ve got a thing for self-punishment and too much time on your hands, listen to dueling versions of a particular song from the two albums and try to spot the differences. My favorite is “The Memory Remains”: same line of lyrics dropped for the crowd to fill in, same weird grunted backing vocals, different hilarious ad-lib from James Hetfield to introduce Kirk Hammett’s guitar solo: he used to say Ahhh, suck it!, and now he’s going with Misterrrrr Hammett! When the crowd sings the song’s central melody like a football chant over an extended orchestral outro, I wondered if they’re singing so confidently because they heard the crowd do the same thing on the first album.