I’m hoarse, my neck is sore from banging my head and my ears will probably be ringing three days from now. So, yeah, the Metallica show Sunday at Verizon Arena in North Little Rock was a rousing success.
The heavy metal heroes were in town during their WorldWired Tour and played for two hours and 15 minutes to a rabid crowd of 17,432.
The group opened with “Hardwired” and “Atlas, Rise” from its latest album, 2016’s Hardwired … to Self-Destruct, before reaching all the way back to its 1983 debut, Kill ‘Em All, for “Seek and Destroy,” which still retains every bit of its thrash-metal fury.
The foursome — singer, guitarist James Hetfield, drummer Lars Ullrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Robert Trujillo — blitzed through 18 of its own songs, and even threw in instrumental cover versions of songs from a pair of Little Rock punk bands.
The stage was placed in the middle of the arena, similar to how it was positioned when the band played here 10 years ago.
Hetfield, who looks like a biker aging gracefully, had eight microphones around the stage’s perimeter to choose from, and used them all to play to every corner of the arena. Hammett reeled off solos effortlessly as Trujillo stalked the stage with his bass slung low and a perpetual smile on his face.
Ullrich’s drum kit was center stage and rotated throughout the evening. The drummer, who co-founded the band in 1981 with Hetfield, is still very much an enthusiastic metalhead, mugging to the crowd, hopping off his stool and whacking his cymbals while standing up. The whole band got into the percussion act at one point, pounding on cubes that rose from the stage like some sort of heavy metal drum circle.
Hetfield’s voice might not have much range, but it remains strong and forceful and he can still nail ballads like “The Unforgiven” and flat-out ragers like “Spit Out the Bone.”
At one point, Hetfield and Ullrich ceded the stage to Hammett and Trujillo, who thrashed their way through brief covers of songs by Econochrist and Trusty, two Little Rock punk bands active in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It was a thoughtful nod to the central Arkansas underground scene before Trujillo segued into the instrumental “(Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth” by Cliff Burton, the Metallica bassist who died in a bus crash in 1986.
Songs from Hardwired … to Self Destruct, were well received but, of course, the catalogue numbers were met with the loudest response. Watching Metallica blast metal staples like “Master of Puppets,” “Creeping Death,” “One” and “Hit the Lights” is like a trip back to the metal corner of the high school parking lot.
There was a three-song encore and the night ended with “Enter Sandman,” the megahit from 1991 that put Metallica and its locomotive style of metal firmly into the mainstream. It was a perfect way to put the evening to bed.
Opening the show, curiously, was comedian and metal fan Jim Breuer, who basically was a Metallica cheerleader, telling stories, doing impersonations — including a dead-on Ozzy Osbourne — and leading the crowd in singalongs to songs by Judas Priest, AC/DC, Pantera and others.