Metallica

So last Wednesday, apparently in an effort to relive my late teens, I went to see Metallica in Detroit.

They were quite good.  Extremely professional, but not without displaying quite a bit of energy.  It was almost 90 at showtime, but apart from a couple of recorded guitar/drum intros, they remained on stage and active for the duration, and even stayed around for quite a while after the encore, talking to fans. It undoubtedly helped that the expectation of thunderstorms pushed the show up by about an hour; these are old men who appreciate the value of an early bedtime.

The setlist was solid, although I wish they had done Creeping Death instead of, say, Fuel. That said, it’s hard to complain too much when Trujillo does a creditable rendition of Anesthesia.  The five songs from the new album are legitimately the best five songs from the new album, and in a significant shift from recent Metallica policy, are actually all pretty good songs.

The crowd was pretty much what you would expect; white folks my age or somewhat older.  It was considerably less violent than the last Metallica concert I saw (1994), but then your contemporary Metallica fan risks much more in lost productivity from a mosh-pit-mishap than s/he did twenty-three years ago.