Metal’s biggest band, Metallica, seemed bigger than usual on Thursday night, when they kicked off their Life Burns Faster residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. With a 160,000-square-foot screen that stretches 240 feet into the air, they had their largest canvas ever for visuals, and they used every inch of it. Although they created jaw-dropping visuals for every song in their set list, they turned the artwork for Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, and … And Justice for All into an immersive, almost 3-D experience for fans when they played those albums’ title songs on the first night. (Rolling Stone will publish a full report about the band’s first weekend, including a deep dive into the full set list for each night and the fan events they set up around the Sphere, after it wraps.)
The first album cover they conjured up was the image of a broken Lady Justice statue (or “Doris” as Metallica fans know her) on the cover of their 1988 double LP, … And Justice for All. The title song itself lasts nearly 10 minutes on the album, so the group was able to build the animation slowly, beginning with a look inside the “Halls of Justice” that frontman James Hetfield sings about before stopping at the base of the statue
The scene, which is animated similarly to a high-end video game, opens up to reveal Doris in the middle of a cylindrical jail as the silhouettes of prisoners peer out from behind bars. (It looked a bit like Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” performance, which was a fitting nod to the King of Vegas Residencies.) They also show a courtroom splattered with neon green paint, like that from the album cover and a gavel comes crushing out from behind the judge’s bench. Eventually, there’s a jailbreak and the prisoners gather at the base of the statue and pull at ropes until it crumbles. The way it breaks felt like it was going to crash down on the audience.
A few songs later, they brought the sleeve for 1984’s Ride the Lightning to life but with a twist when they played the record’s title song. As guitarist Kirk Hammett told Rolling Stone in 2014, he found the title in Stephen King’s novel, The Stand. “There was this one passage where this guy was on death row said he was waiting to ‘ride the lightning,’” he said, inspiring the electric chair motif. At the Sphere, it’s the audience that rides the lightning. There are two wooden arm rests on either side, and if you look up, the electrode cap is hovering over the crowd ready to electrify everyone — and of course there was plenty of lightning flashing everywhere. (Another major highlight related to the album was the band’s performance of Ride the Lightning’s “The Call of Ktulu,” the visuals for which showed H.P. Lovecraft’s monster rising out of the ocean and eventually ransacking Las Vegas.)
The concert closed with an animation of one of Metallica’s most iconic album covers, Master of Puppets, when they played the 1986 album’s title song. Illustrator Don Brautigam painted the original cover, in which hands with marionette strings reach down to the cross headstones of slain soldiers. At the Sphere, those headstones stretched on for what looked like miles as they crept up the dome’s screens. When the scene zoomed in for a closer look, the band members were shown on the crosses until eventually it all flipped upside down and the soldier’s helmet, stashed on the left side of the cover, fell off one and eventually all the crosses started falling. If you looked up, you could see holes where crosses had gone missing as the group raged on.
The concert was the first of 24 concerts Metallica will play at the Sphere for their residency Life Burns Faster, which takes its name from a lyric in “Master of Puppets.” The concerts are grouped into two-night couplings with the group playing unique set lists each night. The first night’s set list leaned heavily on selections from the Black Album and Ride the Lightning, and while it included many fan favorites (“Creeping Death,” “Sad but True,” the songs above) they still have plenty of other hits left in their repertoire (“Enter Sandman,” “One,” “Fade to Black”) for their second gig on Saturday — and they’ll have plenty of other opportunities to change things up since the Life Burns Faster residency has dates booked through March.
Metallica set list:
“Battery”
“Creeping Death”
“Now That We’re Dead”
“Sad but True”
“The Shortest Straw”
“Wherever I May Roam”
“The Day That Never Comes”
“… And Justice for All”
Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo “Doodle”
“Nothing Else Matters”
“The Call of Ktulu”
“Lux Æterna”
“Ride the Lightning”
“The Memory Remains”
“Seek & Destroy”
“Master of Puppets”
