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Monday, May 11, 2015

776. Metallica / 11-6-2003 3rd Show Le Trabendo [Bootleg]. 4/5

A week after the worldwide release of their album St Anger, Metallica embarked on an inventive promotion ploy, playing three gigs on the same day in three separate locations in Paris, France at well known venues. Each gig lasted an hour before packing up and heading for the next gig.
This bootleg is from the third and final gig, played at Le Trabendo. Again, as with the La Boule Noire gig, the recording is good and surprisingly clear for an audience recording, though the tape and microphone do seem to pick up a bit of squelching or feedback, which would bring it back to be a B recording.

The set list again incorporates a mix of songs, which perhaps harps closer to the popular 'modern' era than the previous two gigs. Having started off with "Blackened" they crash into "Fuel" for the first time on the day, which is also probably their hardest song in recent aeons. This is then followed by two further songs from ...And Justice for All, being the brilliant "Harvester of Sorrow" and then "One". Was it a deliberate ploy to have three of the first four songs from that album?
The chosen piece from St. Anger for this gig is the title track, which again shows it's positives and negatives. The song still starts off terrifically, led by James' trademark intro of "Riff!" But once you get to the clear guitar, the high vocals overlaying that, and the weak-arse backing vocals of Rob and Kirk, the song is destroyed. Yikes.
So how do you recover from that? Well, you bring out the big guns, with "Enter Sandman" for the first time on the day, and that old staple of brilliance, "Master of Puppets". After a short drink, the band returns to complete their day with thrash, that being "Creeping Death" and "Hit the Lights".

This is another good bootleg, and together with the first two boots, it covers an interesting day in the history of Metallica. They are all worth a listen, if only to hear where the band was at the beginning of the Rob Trujillo era, and how they have progressed or fallen in your own eyes since.

Rating:  With all our screaming, we are gonna rip right through your brain  4/5

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