Megadeth!

September 18, 2022 – Mansfield, MA

Two living legends in the same week? Hell yes!! Let’s start with the first.

Dave Mustaine. The man! Megadeth!!

On Sunday September 18, 2022 (yes I’m a bit late writing this, but life is busy) I had the pleasure of seeing Megadeth. They put on a great 50-minute set. Wait, what!?

You see, Megadeth was the OPENER for Five Finger Death Punch. This didn’t feel right at all. I was actually shocked when I first learned this and really had no intention of going. But a free ticket was presented to me so I was on my way!!

I didn’t see the first band to play that night and don’t even know who it was. But the 2^nd band, Hu (or is it The Hu) was pretty cool. Whether one likes them or not is irrelevant because what stood out is how unique they are. They have 8 dudes on the stage, with 2 drummers (one is some sort of steel drum), 2 guitars, a bass player, a singer, and two dudes playing some weird ass string instruments with a bow. From my vantage point, I could only see 2 strings on each instrument. They’re style is basically Mongolian Chant Metal. Yep. I said it. Check them out if you want to hear something totally different.

However, I came for Megadeth though, so let’s talk about them!!

They came on stage right around 8pm and opened up with Hangar 18 which was fricken sweet! Now if my memory doesn’t fail me, since in a week’s time I lost my notes, they then moved into Dead & The Fugitive Mind (“Let me introduce myself!), then Angry Again followed by Sweating Bullets.

What really pissed me off was the amount of people still sitting down. Clearly these people came for Five Finger Death Punch. This made me sad. You have a founding member of Metallica up on stage, who then became the founder of Megadeth, playing Megadeth songs live and in person in front of you. Arguably, many of the metal and hard rock bands today wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t partially for this dude. Stand up and show some respect you bastards!!

But I digress…hearing Trust live was awesome. It’s a great tune. They played Symphony of Destruction of course as well as Peace Sells while a dude wearing a Vic Rattlehead costume danced around on stage. They also squeezed in Dystopia and We’ll be Back in there somewhere.

They took a minor break and then did an encore of Holy Wars. Set over.

50 minutes by my watch for Megadeth is depressing. Dave is part of a small community of ultimate rock stars. He’s a legend. Iconic. He’s someone that if I walked by on the street, I’d do my best to not crap my pants because I’d immediately recognize him and hopefully not say anything stupid. Now Five Finger…couldn’t name a single dude and couldn’t pick any of them out in a lineup. But I figured, I’ll check them out. They’re the headliners and must be decent.

So, Five Finger came out and opened with some song. Couldn’t tell you which. I am familiar with some of their stuff, but had no idea what this was. But I wasn’t impressed. Then they did another song, and another. After those three songs, I was done. I decided it was time to leave and I headed out. I continued to be able to hear them all the way out to my car. And all songs continued to sound the same. In my opinion, the singer has no range and the riffs were weak. The chords were heavy – so they at least hit one ingredient in creating metal, but the singer just seemed phony to me. Like a total poser. Plenty of people seemed into them though and knew the words. Others were bopping their heads along to the beat. Clearly, they have a fan base (that sadly outweighs the Megadeth fan base) but I will not be one of them. They sucked. Yeah, I said it!