Review: Metallica thrillingly thunders its way through Night 1 of its Minneapolis takeover

Last summer saw a sea of pink, red, midnight-blue attire and sparkly sequins overtake downtown Minneapolis for two nights of Taylor Swift at U.S. Bank Stadium. This summer, it’s a wave of black, black, more black and the occasional swath of shiny leather studs overtaking the streets around the Vikings’ field, as was witnessed Friday for the first of two nights with Metallica.

Like Swift, Metallica knows how to make a concert seem more like a special event. It did it once before when it played one of U.S. Bank Stadium’s two opening concerts in 2016. It’s doing it like never before in the same big room this weekend.

A variety of fan activities like film screenings and even a bowling night are being held around town in conjunction with Metallica’s two concerts, spread over Friday and Sunday to give the band a breather on Saturday. Hey, you try bashing and screaming out “Creeping Death” when you’re 61.

Also, Metallica is billing it as a “No Repeat Weekend,” meaning Sunday’s set list will be completely different from Friday’s — a crowd-pleasing selection that kicked off with “Creeping Death.”

The opening acts are changing each night, too. Wolfgang Van Halen kicked off Friday’s concert with his Foo Fighter-y band Mammoth WVH, a set that confirmed Eddie Van Halen’s son isn’t just a budding guitar hero but also a strong-voiced rock howler.

In the show’s middle slot, Pantera defied the odds of rising up again and truly raising hell after the deaths of its co-founding brothers, drummer Vinnie Paul and guitarist “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott. The Texas band’s “singer” Phil Anselmo — whose guttural growls sounded as grimy as ever — convincingly led the reformed group through an hour of thunderous sludge-metal.

Anselmo had a couple of metal stalwarts for key support: Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante and Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde. Neither are spring chickens, but they played songs like the opener “A New Level” and the set highlight “Walk” with perfect youthful brawn and bravado, just as the Abbott brothers did in the early ’90s.

“Everything we do, every [expletive] note we play, is for Dimebag and Vince,” Anselmo said. A video tribute to them was played later. Based on the intense reception from fans Friday, the new Pantera could draw the crowd sizes of old should it keep touring.

By the time Metallica took its in-the-round stage at the center of the stadium just before 9 p.m. — with AC/DC and Ennio Morricone for walk-on music — the largely male, mostly middle-aged crowd of about 50,000 fans genuinely felt anxious for the blast of adrenaline they knew was coming. It came full bore, too.

After the opener came two more oldies, “Harvester of Sorrow” and “Hit the Lights,” the latter a welcome surprise from the Bay Area band’s 1983 debut.

Forty-one years later, Metallica has actually aged very well. Its not-fancily-produced music sounds way more timeless than most ‘80s metal. Its lyrical themes of anger, mistrust, dread and destruction still resonate a little too much.

Its members are holding up well, too. Frontman James Hetfield’s voice lacked the hoarseness that sometimes set in when he would growl and howl night after night on tour. The rest of the band sounded as precise and percussive as ever.

They banged out the title track off last year’s “72 Seasons” album with the same fast and furious energy of their older thrashers. They perfectly built up “Fade to Black” into a dramatic mid-show epic. They savagely pounded out “Blackened” and “Fuel” like a demolition crew. They stayed fresh and on point all the way to the monstrous finale, “Master of Puppets” (leaving out “Enter Sandman” for the obvious Night 2 closing song).

They even nailed the little-played 1986 instrumental “Orion” in tribute to their own late band member, bassist Cliff Burton. His eventual replacement, Rob Trujillo, and drummer Lars Ulrich looking positively thrilled hammering away in it.

The band got all the songs so right, it might’ve been a little more fun to hear the quartet mess around a bit, as it did in a moodier, stretched-out version of “Nothing Else Matters.” Although Trujillo and lead guitarist Kirk Hammett did cut loose in a Prince-inspired instrumental jam worked up just for the show, and that got a little too messy.

Even the acoustics inside the notoriously echoey football palace sounded pretty good on Friday, a feat maybe helped by the in-the-round setup. Come Sunday, most of the returning fans’ ears will still be ringing, so the sound quality won’t matter as much for that show.