The Stadium Tour with Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard that hit PNC Park on Friday night was all about a good time, a rockin’ ‘80s pop-metal party, but the bands didn’t, as they say, melt faces.
Enter Metallica.
The kings of thrash metal capped off the run of three concerts in four nights Sunday at PNC — that began with Billy Joel — with their typical display of bludgeoning Thor-style power.
Metallica is still something a novelty in Pittsburgh, at least for younger fans. This was the band’s 11th trip to Pittsburgh and the first since ending a 14-year absence here with a 2018 show at PPG Paints Arena. It was also their first-ever headlining stadium show in the ’Burgh, after having played Three Rivers Stadium twice: bottom of the bill of Monsters of Rock in 1988 and then an opening slot in the pouring rain for Guns ’N Roses in 1992.
Since then, Metallica has become iconic. You can buy their T-shirts at Target, although you wouldn’t want to wear one of those to the show for fear of being laughed at by dudes with real, worn-out Master of Puppets tour shirts.
Metallica didn’t come alone. At 6 p.m., Boston band Ice Nine Kills, taking its name from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, put on a bizarre horrorcore spectacle that may have been cool in the dark. Frontman Spencer Charnas, the lone member of the band that started as ska-punk and now has chalked up a dozen former members, came out looking like a Wall Street investment banker before turning “American Psycho” with an ax.
His blue business shirt ended up covered in (presumably) fake blood from slaying random people on stage, Alice Cooper-style. Musically, it did not sound unlike Fall Out Boy but with the occasional growl in the vocals.
No one died on stage during Greta Van Fleet, the Michigan band that debuted four years ago basically as Greta Van Zeppelin. Singer Josh Kiszka, now 26, has some pipes on him, but if you’re old enough to remember “Bewitched,” he sings like Gladys Kravitz yelling “Aaaaaab-ner!” when she’s seeing something crazy happening next door.
The trio behind him, though, can jam, driven by his slashing twin brother Jake, who not only sounds reasonably like Jimmy Page but adopts his stance and mannerisms. They gave our ears a good bashing on “Lover, Leaver (Taker, Believer)” and “The Weight of Dreams,” which sounded like “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” and “Stairway to Heaven” played together. By the time they finished with “Highway Tune,” they had impressed a tough Metallica crowd.
Metallica, using AC/DC and Ennio Morricone as entrance music, came out hot on a clean stage with five vertical screens lit red and took the crowd back to the beginning — 1983 — with a brutal version of “Whiplash,” its headbanging tribute to the fans, James Hetfield starting the show with “Late at night, all systems go/ You've come to see the show/ We do our best, you're the rest, you make it real, you know.”
For the next two hours, Metallica brought the hammer down hard on a set of songs covering a vast array of such cheerful topics as war, death, suicide, nuclear annihilation, personal demons and the vices that tear us apart.
Somehow, it was fun, though. We’ll get to that.
The first sing-along came three songs in, with the fans belting out the chorus to “Enter Sandman.” LOUD. If you were in the vicinity of Downtown, had a rough weekend and decided to turn in early … oh, well.
“Pittsburgh, how are you feeling?” Hetfield asked with a hint of menace. “Whatever you’re feeling, we’re going to make it more intense.”
Moments that weren’t intense were few and far between, and it was all delivered with a sharp sound mix (at least where I was) and five giant screens that brought us all the action up close, with gnarly visual effects.
Hetfield even did a little play-by-play commentary.
“You like that song?” he asked after a thrashy “Ride the Lightning.” “It’s all right. Let’s try this one.”
“This one” was “The Memory Remains,” the sludgy blues stomp from “Reload” with another shredding solo from Kirk Hammett (wearing a Monster Mash shirt) and a stadium chant of “Whoa-oo, Whoa-oo, Whoa-ooo-ooo-oooh” that extended well after the band stopped playing.
This was clearly an amped crowd.
“You having funnn?” Hetfield asked.
“Yeaaaah!” the crowd responded.
“Well, knock it off,” he quipped.
“Nothing Else Matters,” of course, provided lots of drama and fine string picking from both gentlemen.
“Dirty Window,” a banger from the disparaged “St. Anger,” as Hetfield pointed out, had drummer Lars Ulrich and bassist Rob Trujillo — first mention of that killer pair! — back at almost full speed. Hetfield said he wore his pick out on that one, and it’s entirely believable that someone got a souvenir because the 59-year-old’s downstroke-rhythm playing is still nothing short of relentless.
The frontman has had his battles with the bottle, but that didn’t stop him from offering a hearty “Whiskey in the Jar,” the Dubliners song that Metallica picked up from Thin Lizzy.
The first flames shot from the top of the stage about an hour in on the ominous “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which segued right into “Moth Into Flame,” with an appropriately scorching solo from Hammett and then a cool synth-up on the riff. Hopefully, the Pittsburgh moths knew when the chorus was coming around.
The evening’s most serious moment came on “Fade to Black,” when Hetfield stopped it for a thoughtful PSA. “We’re not supposed to talk about suicide, right, because it’s scary, really scary,” he said. “Everyone here has been touched by it one way or another. We all struggle. We all know what darkness is. And if you are feeling like you need to take your own life, please do not. Please wait. Please talk to somebody. Somebody loves you always. And I love you, no matter what. No matter what you’ve done. You are not ALONE!”
Once again, it went to Hammett to capture all that emotion of that sentiment with the climactic solo.
On a less sensitive note was the immediate follow, the set-closing thrashfest of “Seek & Destroy,” with the crowd chanting along and Hetfield howling “Searching! Seek and destroy! Feels good!”
They returned with fireworks, in the sky and through the speakers, on “Battery,” and drove it home with an awesome laser-light show on “One” and a “Master of Puppets” riding off the tracks as the grand finale.
This one obviously blew away The Stadium Tour. You’d have to go back a few weeks to Rage Against the Machine to find a better match for the stunning power that Metallica wielded in the heart of the city. It was Metallica show No. 5 for me — including Woodstock ‘94 — and this one was right up there.
Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com.
Metallica Set List
Whiplash
Creeping Death
Enter Sandman
Ride the Lightning
The Memory Remains
Nothing Else Matters
Dirty Window
Sad but True
Whiskey in the Jar
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Moth Into Flame
Fade to Black
Seek & Destroy
Encore:
Battery
One
Master of Puppets
First Published: August 15, 2022, 3:13 a.m.
Updated: August 15, 2022, 11:40 a.m.
