I love Beatallica.
I get the joke, I'm in on the joke, and these guys deliver the punchline brilliantly, with witty acumen and solid musicianship. Their third CD, "Masterful Mystery Tour", features some re-recorded updates of a number of the classic tracks that gained them underground fame (such as ‘Got to Get You Trapped Under Ice’, ‘The Thing That Should Not Let It Be’, and ‘And I'm Evil’) in addition to a handful of new songs, including ‘Tomorrow Never Comes’, which combines The Beatles' ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with Metallica's ‘The Day that Never Comes’, from 2009's "Death Magnetic" album release.

Beatallica is purely a comedy outfit, fusing the songs of Metallica and the Beatles into flawlessly-blended, twisted, clever mashups. The gimmick doesn't stop with the recordings; the band members are known only by their pseudonyms: "Jaymz Lennfield", "Kliff McBurtney", "Grg Hammetson III", and "Ringo Larz", with even the album's producer getting in on the act, listed as "Flemball Rasmartin"(George Martin was the Beatles' long-time music producer; Fleming Rasmussen was the producer on all of Metallica's best albums). This is a funny concept for an act, but one that could disastrously misfire. Fortunately, Beatallica execute the schtick with surprising success and hilarious results. Jaymz delivers an absolutely perfect parody of James Hetfield's vocal styles and quirks that every Metal fan needs to hear.

That said, I will warn that full Beatallica enjoyment requires knowledge of all of the musical sources at play, and to their credit, these guys aren't shy about digging into the depths of both bands' catalogs. You kind of have to be well-versed in both the Beatles and Metallica to appreciate the humor. As a Metallica scholar and strong Beatles fan, I get most of the jokes, but there are one or two cases where they draw from Beatles songs unfamiliar even to me, and I find that these moments a bit less personally appealing. That's my bad, though - - not Beatallica's.

"Masterful Mystery Tour" is highly recommended, as are their previous releases, if you like either Metallica (any era) or the Beatles. If you like both bands, then this is a must-have. Apparently Lars Ulrich himself agrees. He came to Beatallica's defense a few years ago when they were faced with record company copyright threats. Let's just hope they can keep going for many more years, and that they're never broken up by Yoko Mustaine.