by Justin Press of Justin Press: Dallas Rock Music Examiner

All hail Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich, and Trujillio.

DALLAS — After years of testing the patience of diehards with their musical search for the lost chord*, Metallica proved with Death Magnetic that it was still "within their hands," but since Flemming Rasmussen was unavailable, Rick Rubin took them back to an authentically heavy comfort zone. The outcome was 9/10 scale as the tempos increased, the precision locked in, the solos blistered, and the vitriol was still intact. Never ones to be anything else than the best live band on the planet (some may argue for Iron Maiden), Metallica has always delivered on the stage, even if their recorded output came up short of fans' expectations.

But with Death Magnetic and the World Magnetic Tour, which hit American Airlines Center in Dallas like a neutron bomb on Tuesday, September 29, Metallica is back to being "Metallica Is Life" for its faithful. 2009 has turned out to be a banner year for the mighty Mets.

Entering like prize fighters thru the crowd, the band's now familiar in-the-round stage set is now harnessed by four coffin-shaped lighting rigs that dropped and hovered above the band during certain intervals of the show. "The Ecstasy of Gold" brought the band out, as the heartbeat at the intro of "This Was Just Your Life" set the pacing of the show with lasers bathing the entire arena in "Floydian" layers. Not wasting a second, the band tore into the Death Magnetic lead-off track, and from there it was full bore for the next two and half-hours.

The band, now seasoned in this stage configuration, worked it like a well-oiled team, as they broke into "The End Of The Line," and a true rarity as "Four Horsemen" was plowed through with the angst of 20-somethings, not 48-year old millionaires.

And the whole reason that the band was playing with such fury? Well how about 20,000 head banging maniacs acting like it was 1985, not 2009. Huge chants, thousands of horns being thrown, and enough beer, weed, and energy to raise the dead, or at least make a 28-year band feel very humble.

Though a vast majority of the new record along with the Black album were given their due ("Holier Than Thou" being a vicious treat), the band made sure to pay homage to the tunes that brought them to the dance, though sadly Ride the Lightning was avoided and only one from Master of Puppets made the cut this night. "One" was its usual furious self complete with howitzer fire and pyro/explosions galore, as the Hetfield/Hammett dual rhythms were crushing. After cutting through with "Cyanide," "Sad But True," "The Unforgiven," and "All Nightmare Long," they were looking for scalps as the tomahawk blood-thirst of "Master of Puppets" and (gulp) "Dyer's Eve" were akin to being pulled over a barbed-wire fence. It was pure furnace power with the air-guitar levels nearing code Red throughout the arena that just left you ravaged.

Trying to calm the inmates with "Nothing Else Matters" didn't work, as "Enter Sandman" just instigated the tribes even more. And if you even want to call them encores, since the band never left the stage, the old Budgie gem "Breadfan" was a quick fix for the Garage Inc. converts. But it was "Whiplash" that had the over-40 crowd reeling, looking for lost youth, if only for 2 1/2 minutes. After countless riffs, endless staging, European style crowd chants, and bursts of metal's most coveted catalog, "Seek and Destroy" closed the mayhem with black balloons dropping from the ceiling like a satanic New Year's celebration. And maybe that's what Tuesday night was, a grand celebration of the darkest parts of our souls but with the power of enlightenment, the kind only brought on by apocalyptic thunder of Metallica.

All hail Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich, and Trujillio. Cliff would've been proud!

*Lamb of God did a fantastic job of working their groove-oriented, punishing metal, minus Mark Morton with Doc Coyle on loan from God Forbid. It's not their usual type of gig and trying to work that island of a stage is like running an obstacle course. Still, they're the second best American metal band in the world. But the night belonged to the Big 4.

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