Mega-Metal Friday’s Crowd Came Out For A Heavy-Metal Beating — Megadeth Deliverd

Megadeth Friday, Feb. 17, at the Coliseum

Thousands of metal-hungry fans clad in concert T-shirts, black jeans and long hair flocked to the Coliseum Friday night to see their hero - Megadeth.

And Megadeth did not disappoint its enthusiastic fans.

Led by singer/guitarist Dave Mustaine, the band belted out a fully charged, revved-up set that lasted more than two hours.

A plethora of Mustaine/Marty Friedman guitar riffs, both thrilling and unrelenting, lashed out like a whip, leaving the audience covered with welts.

The rhythm section also did well to bruise the audience with its wreckingball pummeling.

It was, after all, the heavy-metal beating the crowd came for.

Surprisingly, Megadeth didn’t play many songs from its new album “Youthanasia.” Nor did it feature many songs from 1992’s “Countdown to Extinction.”

Although the band played the hits from those albums, “Train of Consequences” and “Symphony of Destruction,” solidly and fiercely, Megadeth’s newer songs aren’t the band’s strong suit.

The material is slick and contrived and not even close to being as thrilling, intense and urgent as the songs the band wielded on earlier albums, such as “Rust in Peace,” “Peace Sells…But Whose Buying” and “Killing Is My Business…And Business Is Good.”

The standouts played Friday from earlier albums were the stark “Holy Wars,” the thrashing “Hangar 18” and the pessimistic “Peace Sells.”

By inundating its set with older songs, Megadeth shed its mid-tempo mind-set and reminded fans of the greatness it possessed when the quartet was one of the fastest bands on earth.

Should Megadeth redirect its sound by quickening the pace of its songs, the band just might discover there’s still plenty of uncharted musical territory out there.

The lone aspect that detracted from Megadeth’s show was Mustaine’s vocals. There’s no question Mustaine is a phenomenal guitarist, but his abilities as a vocalist are limited.

When he snarls like a wicked madman, he’s great.

But when Mustaine decides to take it up a few registers, his voice becomes whiny and nasally and downright annoying.

Corrosion of Conformity put forth a strong performance as the opening band.

Like a provoked bull, the band charged through a 40-minute set highlighting songs from its most recent albums “Deliverance” and “Blind.”

C.O.C. proved it can pack a wallop with its brutally compelling grooves, especially in the songs “Clean My Wounds” and “Heaven’s Not Overflowing.”

The band’s momentum was interrupted when singer/guitarist Pepper Keenan paused during “Deliverance” after realizing one of his guitars, which was on the side of the stage, had been stolen by someone in the audience.

Fortunately, the person was caught and the guitar was retrieved, even if it did come back in two pieces.

During the set, C.O.C. threw in a couple of hard-core punk songs nodding back to the band’s early days.

The punk-oriented tunes, sung by bassist Mike Dean, accelerated C.O.C.’s mostly mid-tempo set into high gear.