Metallica finds its way home at Fox Oakland show
Twenty years ago, Metallica remerged in public to release their “Load” album, having uniformly shorn their long hair.
No doubt, any 2016 version would have backup singers and a horn section, the mosh pit a distant memory.
The Bay Area group played three songs from their new throwback album, and didn’t play another chord from a song released after 1991.
When the band walked off the stage after 13 songs and a few solos, the fans appeared to have an arms-folded entitlement to their three-song encore.
The new double album “Hard Wired … to Self-Destruct,” only the band’s second filled with new material in 13 years, plays like lovechild of of their 1988 “And Justice for All ...” album and more produced 1991 “Metallica” album.
Of the newer songs, “Atlas, Rise!” fared well, while the live version of the title track sounded even more like an homage to the “Kill ‘Em All” era of the early 1980s.
The band played the Fox against a spare white floor and white backdrop; when the house lights came on, it looked like Metallica playing at your dentist’s office.
(No doubt video screens, flames, crosses, coffins and cross-shaped coffins will be added later.) A few lights turned the background different primary colors, with spotlights that occasionally made the band look like Metallica, transported back in time to TV’s “American Bandstand” in 1962.
Hetfield, growl still potent in his 35th year with the band, continues to look like as a solid third choice behind Draymond Green and Dennis Richmond as the best Bay Area celebrity to back you up in a bar fight.