Metallica @ Great Western Forum – 03/05/2004

After fighting traffics, and dealing with less than intelligent Will Call people, we finally made it inside, but after Godsmack had already left the stage. So we waited while they setup the circle stage for Metallica‘s entrance. Not really a big fan of circle stages, but so be it.

Lights went down, and the band came out to a load and raucous crowd and started the show off with ‘Blackened’. The crowd on the floor was loving it, a mosh pit formed almost immediately. And for the first time in a long time, I saw a real pit; people were there to have fun, and not to have an excuse to beat up the guy next to him. Then the pyro came! During ‘Seek & Destroy’, “explosions” in the light rigging brought it down. They had the light rigging set up to break apart and seem as if it was damaged by the explosions and was falling down. A very cool staging technique, along with the 15-foot pillars of fire on the “corners” of the stage.

Show aspects aside, the boys can still play. They still give it their all and then some. Kirk Hammett is a genius with his guitar. He had two solo “doodles,” just playing around on his guitar, and it was fabulous. I can think of very few people today who can play like he can. And I have to say that I was quite impressed with the new bass player, Robert Trujillo. He definitely fits in with the band on stage, and is part of the “family.”

The encore was exciting because it included some special songs, that hadn’t been played live for a while. The second to last song, ‘Am I Evil?’, hadn’t been played live since a Fan Club only show last year. And the final encore, one final song, putting them over the show curfew for the night, but they wanted to play one more. The last song, ‘Dyers Eve’, has never been played live in it’s entirety ever.

Their set list included, in no particular order: from Ride the Lightning, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, ‘Fade to Black’ and ‘Creeping Death’; from Master of Puppets, ‘Battery’ and ‘Master of Puppets’; from the Black Album (or the self titled, Metallica album), ‘Sad But True’, ‘Nothing Else Matters’, and ‘Enter Sandman’, during their encore. They also played a couple of songs off of the new album, St. Anger, ‘Frantic‘ and ‘St. Anger‘, but the majority of the show was dedicated to the older albums that built their fan base to what it is now.

Overall, a phenomenal return to a venue that the band has not played in nearly eight years.

For a complete set of images from this show, click here!

Seth
seth@unearthed.com