Helping Hands...Live & Acoustic at The Masonic

In 2017, Metallica founded All Within My Hands, a charity providing support for causes as diverse as wildfire relief, local food banks, and the bolstering of community college technical education programs. Recorded in the band’s home city of San Francisco, the acoustic *Helping Hands* serves as both a benefit record and a career-spanning retrospective, showcasing some of the band’s best-loved songs in a setting that brings their stadium-sized power into intimate focus. (The covers—by Bob Seger, Nazareth, Blue Oyster Cult, and Deep Purple—are inspired, too.) As great as it is to hear ballads like “Nothing Else Matters” and “The Unforgiven” stripped bare, it’s even more of a trip to hear how they transform their thrashier classics (“Disposable Heroes,” “Enter Sandman”), including a take on 1983’s “The Four Horsemen” that turns the original’s blistering gallop into slick roadhouse blues.