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Metallica were the greatest thrash metal band ever until 1991, the year of the release of "Metallica" (better known as the "Black Album"). From there, an unstoppable descent from the rock Olympus to the MTV stables began, with unworthy, terrible, ignoble, unlistenable albums like "Load", "Reload", and "St. Anger".
In 2007, the four horsemen embarked on the "Sick of the Studio Tour" and collected an almost endless series of sold-out performances, arenas gone mad, and subsequent audio recordings of most dates. The recordings were then put online on the band's website, but of course, to listen to them, you have to pay. Yes, because for too long now the worm-eaten, nauseating, and overly interested environment of MTV has eaten away the soul of the Metallica too. Nothing is done unless there is a good payoff behind it.
But let's get back to the recordings. Well, I think that Metallica are not only no longer able to produce a decent studio album, but they are also no longer capable of performing live shows: Hetfield is unrecognizable, with a voice that not even Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day misses so many notes, off-key beyond imagination; Lars Ulrich delivers a poor and imprecise performance, and at more than one point completely misses the beat. Hammett seems to be the only survivor of a decomposing carcass. There is no point in analyzing the songs one by one since they are all mangled and sunk by performances that Metallica in the past would never have dreamed of. Yet, seeing the setlist at first gave me a thrill: Master of Puppets is reprised in its entirety, surrounded by various indispensable classics like One, Enter Sandman, Creeping Death, Nothing Else Matters, Seek and Destroy etc. There's even an unreleased song ("The Other New Song") which, for the sake of any metalhead familiar with this band, should not even be listened to.
It is truly a pity that a great band like this has reduced itself to such a pitiful state.
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