By James Murphy
Near the end of their frenetic hour-and-a-half set, Dave Mustaine, the founder and sole remaining original member of “big four” thrash metal juggernaut Megadeth spoke of his 2020 throat cancer diagnosis: his friends said they felt sorry for the cancer. Mustaine, who survived a childhood where he was raised by his alcoholic Jehovah’s Witness parents, juvenile delinquency, being kicked out of Metallica at 20, decades of addiction, the temporary loss of an arm, and rigorous training in three martial arts, accepted the challenge; he emerged, cancer free, still sober, and, with The Sick, the Dying….and the Dead!, the highest charting album of their career.
Dave Mustaine, having endured and overcome all that he has, could be described as the heavy metal Terminator, making the first single of their latest album, ‘We’ll Be Back’ quite appropriate. With Megadeth, though, we’ll be back is a less accurate description, compared to he’ll be back. Addiction, premature death, sex scandals, and artistic disagreements have seen Mustaine’s collaborators come and go. For Mustaine, the constant, it was the love and loyalty of his fans, he said, that helped him through the chemotherapy.
While the band flirted with the mainstream in the 1990s, Mustaine consciously decided not to fuel the subsequent fan-backlash, but rather extinguished it by almost immediately steering the band back to their thrash metal roots: heavy and rapid palm-muted downstrokes and arpeggios, virtuoso guitar solos, menacing apocalyptic warnings. With their new release, Megadeth aimed to re-energise the thrash metal community, to wrest metal back from the corporate influences and restore integrity to the genre.
While the band is touring in support of new album, their set list only featured their first single and ‘Soldier On!’, alongside a career retrospective, beginning with ‘Hangar 18’, ending with ‘Holy Wars…The Punishment Due’, and touching on all the hits: ‘Sweating Bullets’, ‘Symphony of Destruction’ and the comparatively mellow ‘A tout le monde’ garnered the most enthusiastic responses of the night, along with the guitar solo gloriousness of Brazilian Kiko Loureiro on ‘Tornado of Souls’. Two giant screens either side of the drum kit streamed scenes of carnage, fields of skulls, mushroom clouds, and cities ablaze through it all, as Mustaine raced from microphone to microphone, allowing audiences to glimpse the metal master, no matter where they stood.
Megadeth were joined by Knotfest colleagues, Sweden’s In Flames, who burned through their death metal set and were warmly received, but they were unable to ignite a circle pit for long; it wasn’t that kind of crowd. It was a night where Megadeth demonstrated that after all these years, they, and thrash metal, are not de(a)d yet.
No Comments