“Metallica family is alive and welcome to everyone,” growled James Hetfield to thousands of fans old and young. This fact alone is fairly remarkable considering that the thrash metal legends have spent 37 years playing music that is heavy, fast and intense. Yet besides some greying hair, Metallica were sharp and agile when they came through Portland, Oregon on December 5 for an arena gig at the Moda Center.
Getting the crowd fired up was comedian Jim Breuer, who did impressions of heavy metal gods and brought up audience members for Metallica trivia. In typical fashion, the band let time drag on and waited for the crowd to get loosened up before finally coming on to a scene from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as they have done for the last several years. They blasted into the set with the machine gun drumming and punk shredding of “Hard Wired”, the opening track off their most recent album Hardwired…to Self-Destruct. Songs from this album would make up much of the set, and its songs did not disappoint as it is one of their strongest studio efforts in years. Songs like “Atlas, Rise!” and “Now That We’re Dead” – even with its industrial rock group drum solo introduction – hearkened back to earlier eras of Metallica. The album’s material feels like a return to form with fast songs that lean more towards punk and thrash as opposed to the band’s more ballad-heavy material more suited for the mainstream. Hetfield and company seemed to revel in nostalgia of being a part of heavy metal history, complementing the music with visuals of old ticket stubs, newspaper clippings and memorabilia that played on cube screens above their heads. In a tribute to Portland’s revered punk band Poison Idea, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo even treated the audience to a weird but hard-hitting cover of “Taken By Surprise”.
The band played in the middle of the crowd on a stage that, while unassuming at first, had plenty of gadgets under the hood. Pyrotechnics and even a choreographed army of drones exploded out of the platform while Hetfield and company ripped through longtime favorites off albums like Ride the Lightning, Kill ‘Em All, Ride the Lightning, and Master of Puppets. The audience reveled in the timeless brutality and sonic bombardment of songs like “Seek & Destroy”, “Creeping Death”, the sludgy shredder “For Whom The Bell Tolls”, and “No Remorse”. The combination of Lars Ulrich’s energetic drumming, Robert Trujillo’s muscled bass backbone, Kirk Hammett’s rock and roll guitar strut, and James Hetfield’s vicious snarl created a pounding wall of intensity that hit the audience like a strong high.
All of the antics on display, from the massive bursts of flames to the band rotating around the stage for a 360 degree experience, to the pacing of the setlist, captured what has made Metallica titans of heavy metal music for close to four decades. After two hours of relentless rocking, the band returned to the stage and performed the explosive thrash song “Spit Out The Bone” before going into two of their biggest songs of all time: the epic dark ballad “Nothing Else Matters” and the megahit hard rocker “Enter Sandman”. With flames spewing from the stage and the crowd headbanging in unison, the band demonstrated a perfect understanding of how to give the people what they want and keep the Metallica family alive and thriving for so long.
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A few small things. First, Metallica is usually on stage within 5 minutes of when they post their set time. It’s extremely rare for them to not be on time, so my guess was that there was a BTS issue of some sort. Second, they have been using the Ecstasy of Gold intro since around 82-83. The video of the scene from the movie started not long after that as well.