The new Metallica Sphere video puts “…And Justice for All” back in front of fans who could not be in Las Vegas. Louder’s October 17 report highlights official footage filmed October 1 on the opening night of the Life Burns Faster residency. This is a newly circulated performance clip from an earlier show, not a report on tonight’s concert.
The roughly nine-minute song is the title track of Metallica’s 1988 fourth album. Louder reports the October 1 performance was its first live outing in twelve years. The band also released footage of “The Call of Ktulu” from that same evening. The official video is linked below so readers can watch the performance itself.
That is a different angle from an opening-night account: the documented performance is now available to revisit, with the band supplying the footage. It is not a new studio recording, a newly announced album or evidence of the setlist at any later show. The calendar matters even when the guitar parts are sufficiently complicated to make time feel negotiable.
Commentary: an extended album track asks something different of an audience than a thirty-second nostalgia clip. You settle in for changes, returns and a composition that refuses to behave like background wallpaper. For listeners who once flipped a cassette to keep an album going, that is a familiar kind of commitment. Apparently we still have an attention span when somebody gives it a decent assignment.
Official concert footage also gives the remote listener a specific reference point. You can talk about the performance actually shown rather than merging fan memories from several nights into one imaginary super-concert. The clip is a document of a date, even if a residency’s visual scale encourages the impression that the whole thing exists outside ordinary geography.
Watch the linked video as an October 1 performance reaching a wider audience through this week’s coverage. Leave future setlists to future shows. The pleasure here is already substantial: a long, knotty piece of late-eighties metal in a contemporary concert setting, still requiring the listener to stay for more than the chorus. Your old album habit has not become obsolete. It merely found better screens.
Sources and photograph
Louder, Stef Lach, October 17. Metallica, official performance video.
File concert photograph from London in 2017; not the Sphere performance shown in the new official video. Photo: Kreepin Deth; CC BY-SA 4.0. Display copy resized. Original photograph and rights record. Image-use terms.
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