The Black album was a big dividing point for a lot of Metallica fans, and they’ve endured cries of “sell out!” from day one.
Then again, remember the underground fans thought they sold out with Kill ‘Em All because it wasn’t as raw as the demo, but when Metallica offloaded untold millions of albums, and were all over the radio and MTV, many of their fans abandoned them in disgust.
Still, as I’ve written here many times before, if you want to do a more commercial crossover album, the Black album was really the way to do it, and where a lot of people groaned when he brought in Bob Rock to produce, he really opened up the band’s sound more than any of their previous albums. (As Rock recalled in Rolling Stone, he told Metallica they never sounded like a band, it was “the James and Lars show,” and Rock went a long way in making the album a band effort.)
A lot of bands in recent years will perform their classic albums in their entirety, and as Blabbermouth.net reports, Metallica performed the entire Black album live at the Synot Tip Arena in Prague, and they performed the album in reverse order, beginning with the last song, The Struggle Within, and ending with Enter Sandman.
In this show, there were several songs that Metallica never played live from the album, including Don’t Tread on Me, and Struggle Within. You may also recall that Metallica have also performed the Master of Puppets album in its entirety years back as well.
The band’s set list for the show included the following songs in order:
Hit the Lights, Master of Pupperts, The Shortest Straw, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Blackened, The Struggle Within, My Friend of Misery, The God That Failed, Of Wolf and Man, Nothing Else Matters, Through the Never, Don’t Tread on Me, Wherever I May Roam, The Unforgiven, Holier Than Thou, Sad But True, and Enter Sandman. The encore songs were Fuel, One, and they closed with Seek and Destroy.