Originally posted in: http://valkyrianmusic.com/2012/08/09/vagos-open-air-2012-2nd-day/

» Now old school for real was on the way: Overkill! It had been a decade since the New Jersey thrashers visited Portugal for the last time, as Bobby “Blitz” Ellsworth recalled, but he could see how they “still have many friends here”.

The band released its 16th full-length of originals last March (“The Electric Age”) and its first track, “Come And Get It”, that started up the show. And oh how it started! As Blitz would mock later, “when was the last time you got your ass kicked by an old man?”. At 53, he does kick ass indeed.

After “Wrecking Crew” he asked rhetorically if it felt good. “It makes your heart beat faster”. And it always felt like that in Europe, especially in Portugal. Yes, I know they say that everywhere they go, but there’s no one who doesn’t like to hear it.

They played a few songs from the new album, of course, but the rest of the set was made of classics, one after the other. I’m still sorry that they didn’t play “Bastard Nation”, but I must understand – it’s not easy to reduce 32 successful years to less than one hour and a half.

“Old School” was introduced with the first verses of the chorus, but Blitz “personalized” it to the Portuguese reality, by saying “we drank some beers – some Super Bocks”.

And speaking of introductions, I have to mention the band’s, when it came to D.D. Verni and we were told he was “the most evil man in Portugal tonight”.

“We learnt this a long time ago. You do this not by yourselves, you do it together. You do it faster, you do it louder, but together”. If you know a minimum about the band, then you know this speech would end in “In Union We Stand”.

They left “Deny The Cross”, “Rotten To The Core” and “Fuck You” for the encore – the latter a song originally performed by the Canadian punk band The Subhumans, but that Overkill made famous.

Somewhere in the encore, Blitz asked the crowd to scream and wasn’t satisfied with the first outcome (I wonder if they ever are…). So he used the oldest trick in the book: “is this Portugal or España?”. After we booed and screamed three times louder, Blitz smiled and said “works every fucking time”. «

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