Mike Portnoy recently sat down with The Prog Report’s Wheel of Rock podcast and revealed which Metallica album he doesn’t favor much.
The Prog Report’s series features panelists spinning a wheel of a band’s albums and ranking them from highest (‘S’) to lowest (‘D’). With Portnoy and four others, they added three special albums and a ‘wild card’ to adjust rankings. Speaking of Metallica’s live 1999 orchestral album ‘S&M,’ the drummer said it is a C for the tier rank and noted:
“I’m not the biggest fan of this, to be honest. I have no problem, obviously, with bands playing with orchestras. It seems like all the great bands have done it at this point.”
Dissonance In The Details
He continued, explaining what he dislikes about the record:
“I was not the biggest fan of Michael Kamen’s orchestrations. They sounded very dissonant. They didn’t play to the songs as much as I personally would have wanted [them] to. He was almost creating a very counterpoint dissonant kind of string arrangement.”
The musician further talked about why his reception of the work was unfavorable:
“I get why they did it. It’s kind of a time-honored tradition for rock and metal bands to play with an orchestra. I did it with Dream Theater and did it with Sons of Apollo. I just think it missed the mark a little bit. And it was also in the time period with ‘Load’ and ‘Reload’ where I was just kind of checking out at that point. So maybe it didn’t hit me as hard because my headspace in the late ’90s / early 2000s.”
Sequel To ‘S&M’ And Evolution
Later, Metallica also released ‘S&M2,’ which was a sequel to their 1999 album ‘S&M.’ They recorded it at a 2019 concert in San Francisco. The performance was also turned into a movie released on October 9, 2019. Speaking of what they aimed for in the second album in a 2020 chat with Uproxx, Kirk Hammett said:
“Well, we knew from the first album that there needed to be a balance, and finding that balance was a trick. With the first one, there wasn’t much of a precedent. The only precedent, really, that we can really think of that was similar was the Deep Purple album [‘Concerto for Group and Orchestra’]. A concerto written for the London Philharmonic, but that was written in collaboration, and for symphony, and it was different on that behalf.”
The ‘S&M2’ concert, marking 20 years since the original ‘S&M’ album, was held and recorded at Chase Center on September 6 and 8, 2019. Conductors Edwin Outwater and Michael Tilson Thomas led the symphony orchestra. This event also celebrated the opening of the Chase Center. Wayne Isham, who directed the first ‘S&M,’ filmed the concert.
You can see the video below.
