Forging Ahead, Rock Solid

Back in the early ‘80s, bands like Poison, Cinderella and Winger were heavy-metal heroes. Encased in spandex and armed with loud guitars, poppy hooks and endless waves of hair, they churned out rock that was long on bawdy fun and garishly short on substance.

Yet even as the party-hearty brigade rallied around its sex-drugs-and-rock-’n’-roll ethos, an underground backlash began. Inspired by the lean, aggressive approach of hard-core punk, a new school of metal bands coalesced, determined to achieve something more than the standard bump-and-grind.

Though Metallica was in the vanguard of that revolution, it never has been content to settle into a groove. For 13 years, the quartet from the Bay Area not only has helped define the speed metal premise, but also has stretched it in some surprising directions, from the Grammy-winning opus “One” (based on Dalton Trumbo’s shattering antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun”) to the “Garage Days Re-Revisited” collection of punk covers that was a tribute to early mentors.

On its last, self-titled album, Metallica demonstrated that it is possible to execute a ballad (“Nothing Else Matters”) without resorting to mushy cliches. Its current album, “Load,” is peppered with Motorhead-style grit and threaded with slide guitar, and packs a genuine pop hit, “Hero of the Day.”

Still, in the realm of Metallica, the stage remains the great equalizer, and when the band took over the sold-out Forum on Friday night, it tackled nearly two hours of material old and new with the bristling panache that is Metallica’s hallmark.

The band’s devout commitment to touring has been a big factor in its success, and though it bridged the gap from club to arena long ago, it never has stopped trying to break down the distance that stadium shows place between musicians and their fans.

For its current tour, Metallica is performing in the round on a figure-eight stage equipped with two drum rostrums and six lighting towers that can be raised and lowered like giant hydraulic arms. Imposing as it was, the band members negotiated it with ease, dashing from one end to the other to interface with as much of “the pit” surrounding them as possible.

The power of Metallica’s music lies not only in the tensile strength of the compositions, but also in the tightly interlocking ensemble work. The crushing riffage hammered out by frontman James Hetfield and guitarist Kirk Hammett is as much a rhythmic component as the seismic grooves that drummer Lars Ulrich detonates. Jason Newsted’s bass lines can carry a melody as capably as the guitars, and Ulrich knows how to nail a hook in place with a few well-placed cymbal crashes.

That synergy was even more palpable on Friday, connecting the band members as they worked their way around the stages.

Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich and Newsted keep growing as musicians, and with every tour, fresh facets of their playing surface, infusing older songs with new dynamics. Hetfield’s vocals especially have improved much in recent years. Friday he snarled his way through the gnarly “Wasting My Hate” (which he facetiously dedicated to the band), then launched into a bracing rendition of “Nothing Else Matters.”

*

After the first encore, the band literally (sort of) brought the house down. At the end of “Enter Sandman,” the set began to go haywire. In a carefully choreographed “catastrophe,” lighting techs fell out of the scaffolding and a chain of explosions went off; it all culminated when a flaming stuntman posing as a roadie ran across the stage.

Of course, staging scary incidents is nothing new in rock: Ozzy Osbourne stumbled into it and Alice Cooper built his career on it. But for Metallica, it was just the band’s way of ensuring that everyone got the maximum bang for his or her buck.