Concert Review: Metallica at MSG

Metallica: (clockwise from left) Rob Trujillo, James Hetfield, Kirk Hammett, Lars Ulrich

Metallica's fourth New York area show of their ongoing World Magnetic tour raised the roof at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night. The boys opened with the one-two combination of "That Was Just Your Life" and "End of the Line", racing through old-style chord sections, radical time changes and James Hetfield's barked, spat, growled vocals.

Death Magnetic is a pretty good Metallica album, and this tour has the band taking out their new material and playing six of the new tracks with confidence, a marked contrast to the 2004 St. Anger tour where they would play one, maybe two songs from that album in a show. (Personally, I hope that some of the better Anger songs make a comeback on a future tour, leaving the band's more conservative fans scratching their heads, or possibly holding their ears.)

The show is 15 songs--five from Magnetic, five "standards" ("Master of Puppets", "One", "Sandman", etc.) and five "band's choice" cuts from anywhere in the history of Metallica. We got lucky--they played "Creeping", "The Shortest Straw", "Fade to Black", "Dyer's Eve" and in the encore, "Trapped Under Ice". Throughout, James, Rob, and Kirk jammed together and far apart on the in-the round stage, playing some songs at breakneck speed ("Creeping Death" actually sounds faster than on the record) and taking crunchers like "Sad But True" at a normal pace, instead of the slow, "heavy" de-tuned trudge that made past performances of this song seem endless.

The whole show was infused with positive energy. Rob Trujillo has really become part of the band (hard to believe he's been in Metallica six years now) and his bass-playing is a huge contribution to the success of this tour and of the whole Death Magnetic campaign. He and Lars lock together beautifully, and Kirk sounds like he's in his element, with the shredding solos of old replacing the annoying wah-wah fests of the Load era.

The band closed with "Last Caress", "Ice" and a ripping "Seek and Destroy",played with the house lights on as giant black balloons were tossed into the audience. The evening ended on a sweet note as the band celebrated Kirk's birthday onstage (three days early) with a sudden cream-pie assault by band and crew, followed by James leading the sold-out Garden crowd in "Happy Birthday."