Metallica on Tour

So Metallica announced their tour dates and it includes an October 25th date in Kansas City. For some reason I’m thinking I’d like to go which is strange since I had written them off long ago.

The last time I saw them live was in 1992, part of the Metallica/Guns & Roses tour. Since then they’ve released Load (which I liked) but after that a series of missteps, including “Reload”, the whole Napster thing, “St Anger”, and “Some Kind of Monster”. Every time I see or hear Lars I cringe because at this point he seems like nothing more than a whiner.

Part of the problem is that I want to like them. When I heard “Master of Puppets” in 1986 I was completely blown away - I had never heard anything like it before. Seeing them live clinched it. So it really pains me to watch them release a bunch of crap.

I know part of the reason I’m thinking about going is the new Sprint Center which I’ve never been to. Van Halen played there but that didn’t really interest me, nor did the string of adult contemporary acts to follow. I know the clincher will be the ticket prices, and I have a bad feeling about those.

Here’s a live version of one of their new songs. It certainly sounds better than the stuff on “St Anger”, but nothing about it really grabs me. If there was a piece of software that could write songs and you told it to write a Metallica song, this is what I imagine it would come up with. It sounds right, but it lacks feeling.