Live music review: Metallica takes on Adelaide Oval for M72 Australian tour
As the US band played to about 45,000 people, it was drummer Lars Ulrich’s performance, in particular, that vanquished any lingering doubts about the longevity of these old headbangers.
The best musicians make difficult tasks look easy. So it was at the Adelaide Oval on Wednesday night, when the most popular heavy metal band on the planet seemed to barely raise a sweat even while performing some of its most challenging material.
On the second date of its five-city Australian tour – its first visit to these shores in 12 years – Metallica didn’t just play its music. That verb feels too passive to be accurate.
No: these four elite musicians rode, harnessed and commanded 16 twisting, tricky tunes with a pure mastery that underlined why this band has spent decades flexing and strengthening its collective muscle as the genre’s unmatchable, deathless high achievers.
Heavy metal is music made by nerds. You don’t become an elite guitarist, drummer or bassist in this particular field without thousands of hours of dedicated practice, to the exclusion of most other things in life, usually clocked up during adolescence.
So it was for the four musicians of Metallica, who as young men devoted themselves to the deeply unpopular, deeply uncool subgenre of thrash metal after forming in San Francisco in 1981.
That this band is playing stadiums 44 years later on its world tour, dubbed M72, is remarkable on many levels, not least the fact that its ongoing success offers living proof that cultural trends and personal fortunes can change if artists have the will, desire and talent to make it so.
In 1991, the quartet’s ship came in after a decade of hard graft with its fifth and self-titled album, otherwise known by the colour of its cover. “With The Black Album, Metallica went from being the world’s most commercially significant cult band to being a mainstream concern,” observed British co-authors Paul Brannigan and Ian Winwood in a 2015 biography titled Into the Black.
The strength of the songwriting, performances and production on that album saw Metallica spring from theatres to arenas amid a seemingly endless treadmill of live shows on the back of crossover hits and era-defining radio songs like Enter Sandman and Nothing Else Matters. The world tour that followed that album’s release comprised 201 concerts across 23 months; most of those gigs lasted for more than three hours.
Such endurance is easy enough when you’re a hungry, hyped-up artist in your 20s who’s thrilled to find a rabid new audience for your once-weird art form, and when you’re kept on the road thanks to a seemingly endless diet of stimulants, alcohol and incessant fan demand.
But those four guys on stage in Adelaide could no longer be considered young. Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett is now 62, as is singer/guitarist James Hetfield; drummer Lars Ulrich is 61, and so too is Robert Trujillo, whose 22-year tenure with the band makes him Metallica’s longest-serving bassist.
Arrangements such as Master of Puppets (1986) and One (1988) are taxing for any band to play well, yet like everything else Metallica played on Wednesday night, these songs offered no evidence of struggle, as the men playing them appeared like ants against the five enormous LED screens looming behind them.
Nor were there any concessions to their age, except for Hetfield describing 1984’s Fade to Black as “a song written a couple of hundred years ago”.
His speech, oddly, arrived midway through the arrangement, which the singer paused to underline its depressive lyrical themes. “This is a song about suicide,” he said. “We don’t want to lose any more people to suicide, all right? Are you with me? You are not alone!”
This was a surprising and touching moment, and it drew Hammett’s bluesy, wah-heavy guitar solo at song’s end into sharper focus, such that it became a wordless, superlative celebration of life itself.
A suicide prevention message at a Metallica show: something all but unthinkable in the past, when the show was both performed and attended chiefly by young people, who tend to revel in the dark imagery in which heavy metal has long draped itself, and who tend to believe they’re invincible.
Yet people change, and it was a welcome step for the singer to interrupt the concert with such a wholesome, inclusive message in support of mental health and sharing one’s problems before they become overwhelming. (This is the same band, you may recall, that’s encouraging its Australian fans to donate blood and plasma to Red Cross Lifeblood. Metalheads can be a caring, generous lot, despite the aggressive sound of the music they love.)
The only other nod to their age was Hetfield’s mid-set gag about he and Ulrich – the band’s co-founders and shared creative nucleus – stepping off stage to have a break and “change a diaper” while Hammett and Trujillo jammed a duo version of two Australian rock classics in INXS’s Need You Tonight and, in a nod to favoured sons from SA capital, The Angels’ Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again? (The pair committed to the full song, impressively, rather than a brief snippet.)
As a unit, the musicians’ shared precision was astonishing. Close your eyes and you could have been listening to Metallica at any point during its long career. Even some of the night’s weaker selections – most notably Moth Into Flame, the only track aired from 2016’s Hardwired … to Self-Destruct – were blitzed with fleet-fingered ferocity that was hard to fault.
Though M72 is ostensibly a tour in support of its newest album, 2023’s 72 Seasons, the quartet saw fit to air just one song from that release – and the shortest one at that, in Lux Aeterna, for which Ulrich jumped onto a second drum kit positioned near the front of the stage, up near Hetfield’s main microphone – one of several dotted around the D-shaped stage design, with its most hardcore (and cashed-up) fans moshing inside a built-in pit that had them effectively locked in and surrounded by the quartet for the duration.
Not that you’ll catch many longtime fans disappointed by a relative dearth of new material; despite its best efforts, the group hasn’t released a great album since 2008’s Death Magnetic. And it was during one of those tracks that Hetfield chose to change things up by sitting on a stool to concentrate while picking a delicate, complicated guitar riff. (Sitting at a Metallica show? Another thing that was once unthinkable.)
It was during this song – perhaps the last true masterpiece the band has composed – that Hetfield shone strongest, as he sang one of his sweetest melodies while performing that devilishly tricky motif. In its closing minutes, he rose from the stool to end this stunning piece on his feet, duelling with Hammett at pace, their fingers burning up their fretboards while the rhythm section built to a storming finish.
When Hetfield asked for a show of hands to signify first-time viewers, roughly half the audience responded in the affirmative. This was an extremely healthy response to a band in its early 60s, though the 12-year gap between visits – and a pop cultural boost via its 2022 inclusion on the soundtrack to hit TV show Stranger Things – probably didn’t hurt.
Among fans, Ulrich has been a long-maligned figure behind the kit, and unfairly so. Each of his bandmates is attempting to replicate the feel and spirit of music made by younger men, and in this sense, he has the hardest job.
Yet even during the show’s most intense moments – the double-kicking bass drums thundering at the end of Fade to Black, say, or the staccato bursts of One, whose compelling stage production now matches the militaristic thrust of its lyrics – he kept terrific pace with the shadow of his past self.
In a 2019 interview, the drummer estimated the band could tour “maybe to my early-to-mid 70s and then as long as we can keep going without, you know, falling prey to the physical ailments that can cut these things short. Knock on wood.”
Watching them tear it up before about 45,000 people at the Adelaide Oval, it was Ulrich’s performance, in particular, that vanquished any lingering doubts about the potential longevity of these old headbangers.
So long as they have these four musicians have the will – and the fans have the demand – there seems no good reason for Metallica to cease activity as a touring outfit; not when they’re playing this well.
“Playing is something that keeps us alive,” said Ulrich in that same interview. Six years later, it is clear that nothing has changed, and it’s a major credit to Metallica that its music continues to evoke such a stunning blend of drama, passion, vitality and euphoria.
The writer travelled to Adelaide with the assistance of Live Nation Australia. Metallica’s M72 tour continues in Melbourne (Saturday), Brisbane (November 12) and Sydney (November 15).
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