Metallica Thrills Gillette Stadium With Timeless Hits

FOXBOROUGH, MA — If you didn't like this show, frankly my dear, Metallica doesn't give a damn.

Lead singer James Hetfield made it clear about two songs into their show at Gillette Stadium Friday night that their shows are all about the music and the fans who pay to see them.

"I hope you’ve come to kick some *** like we have. Metallica doesn't give a **** what you’ve done in your live, the color of your skin, what you believe in, your religion, what you eat. We’re here to celebrate life and heavy music," Hetfield said at the beginning of the set.

There wasn’t anything really fancy about Metallica’s near-capacity performance in Foxborough Saturday night aside from some well-timed lights and fire. On a stage barren of any props or unnecessary structures, the show was going to be about the music, with the exception of some appropriately timed fire during "Fuel" and use of lasers to represent gunfire and fireworks for explosions for "One," a song about a World War I soldier who found himself blind, deaf, and without limbs after stepping on a land mine.

Not one for a delay, the band quickly jumped into newer songs "Hardwired" and "Atlas, Rise." If you walked into the show completely ignorant of the band's catalog of music, you would have had no idea that those songs are newer, or that the third song, "For Whom the Bell Tolls", came out in the mid-80s. The band may have looked older than when they performed their first shows, but the songs played during the roughly two-hour set have aged quite well.

In fact, outside of some of the tracks on their new album, "Hardwired... to Self-Destruct" there wasn't much straying from their hits of the 80s and early 90s. That is a little understandable given the backlash when albums like St. Anger were released. Perhaps that's why the new stuff sounds like the old stuff, and a consistent, signature sound isn't the worse thing to have.

After Fuel, the band jumped straight into "The Unforgiven" before playing two more songs from the new record, Now What We're Dead and Moth Into Flames.

While Hetfield took most of the attention, as expected, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett and basest Robert Trujillo had their moment to shine between "Halo On Fire" and the 1982 classic "Hit the Lights." After dueling to the 2000's "I Disappear," Trujillo performed his tribute to the band's former basest Cliff Burton, who died in a 1986 bus crash.

The the second half of the 18-song set was nothing short of a collection of the band's most well-known songs and older songs loved by hardcore fans. The band blasted through "Sad But True," "One," "Master of Puppets," "Fade to Black," "Seek and Destroy," "Battery," "Nothing Else Matters," and "Enter Sandman."

Midway through the show, Hetfield took a poll to see how many fans have been to a Metallica show before and how many were at their first. The 50-50 show prompted the lead singer of the 36-year-old band to say that they may have to play another 36 years. Based on how they played Friday night, there would probably be few complaints about that.

Volbeat and Local H were the openers.

Images Courtesy of Gillette Stadium/David Silverman