Last night Kristen came along with me to San Jose’s HP Pavillion, also known as the Shark Tank to see Metallica’s final show of the year.
It was a night of glorious, ear and earth-shattering, face-melting, shaking the pillars of heaven heavy metal! We missed opening band Volbeat’s set but caught the last 3 songs by San Jose’s own Machine Head. Then after 30 minutes or so of anticipation the lights all went down. The audience started screaming.
Then the moment we were waiting for came… Ennio Morricone’s “Ecstacy of Gold” started playing. (If you don’t know this dramatic piece of music…this is the music played before the final gunfight in the movie “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”) When this ended, crazy laser lights were all over the place as they played through “This Was Just Your Life” – the first track off of their latest album, Death Magnetic.
Overall, they played a set of 2 hours of music… and most of it was heavy including half the songs from Death Magnetic, songs off of Ride the Lightning, and of course fan favorites “Enter Sandman” and “Master of Puppets”. During their encore, they played some cover songs by Diamond Head before ending the night by requesting that the audience be prepared to sing 3 words at the right time and for the venue’s lighting guy to turn all the house lights up so that the bad could see all of us. They then ripped into the classic “Seek and Destroy” off of their first album, Kill ‘Em All.
The show was an amazing spectacle. Lights and lasers, 4 giant white coffins hanging over the stage were moving up and down, and yes, there were bursts of fire! The band has not lost their edge and sound aggressive, brutal and in my opinion HEAVIER than when they released their first album. It was an awesome night of music with many diverse groups of people coming together as one as they sang together, screamed together, and of course, head banged and threw out the devil horns together! I can’t wait to see them again.
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