I was seeing Obituary for the third time this summer, and finally they had found the sort of venue that fit them perfectly. Here, at MTV's Headbanger's Ball tour with Agnostic Front, As We Fight and Pilgrimz, Obituary managed to turn me into a fan of their live show. Me, a diehard non-deathmetal listener. That's quite a feat!

The way they did it was to add even more energy and vibe to the show. I mean, I thought it was good at Wacken, but this completely took me by surprise. Their sound was also pretty good, although they, like the ones before them, had to make due with a mediocre lighting without much frontlights.
The crowd had grown tremendously, and was now filling almost the entire room. I even saw Mike Gallo (bassist of Agnostic Front) pop up at one point.
Stage diving, crowd-surfing and extreme headbanging were present parts of the crowd-life throughout the entire show, and everyone was in a great mood. And for good reasons; the one thing I had seen as a drawback in the earlier shows was the lack of crowd-contact. This was however corrected for this show, as John Tardy who was in a very good mood this evening, had no problem making conversation in the breaks. Maybe not so much, but it still kept the whole thing flowing, and just took it that one step higher than last time. That is something that gives extra credit in my book.

At the start of the encore we were treated to a drum-solo by Donald Tardy which I, at a start, found rather basic and uninteresting, but again I was taken by surprise as he built on and added more and more stuff as it went along, and it ended up being a very fast-pumping and excellent solo which towards the end was joined by Ralph Santolla. After a short-lived duet, Ralph completely overtook the solo, and gave us a lesson in blazing guitar handling.
As the ending anthem we were once again given the band-classic Slowly We Rot, to everybody's delight.