Darkness had set when some of the grand old men of thrash took the Main Stage at Metaldays.
Age wasn’t about to come between a good ass-kicking though, as the iconic vocalist so eloquently put it – Overkill was out for Slovenian blood, and they seemed sure they were going to get it!

”When was the last time you had an old man kick your ass?!”
- Bobby ‘Blitz’ Ellsworth (vocals)

The formula for this was a concert of well-tested musical material and an energetic show, two things that usually does the trick perfectly.
And the show was energetic, no doubt about it, at least from some. The just as iconic face for the band, bassist Carlos ‘D.D.’ Verni, made a good impression and held the steam throughout. The rest of the musicians were also headbanging hard, but didn’t stick out for me in quite the same way, and Ellsworth although being a power-house and a magnet for the audience’s eye often left the stage during the musical passages in the songs – whether he was feeling under the weather or just naturally exhausted I cannot say, but whatever it was, he didn’t let on during the time he was on stage, and his voice was as screamy as ever.

“I say it now and I’ve said it before, Metaldays is rotten to the core!”
- Ellsworth (vocals)

If Overkill was after blood, they had their pick tonight, that’s for sure! The old thrash quintet had pulled an impressively large audience out of their tents or up from the river, and as the temperature became marginally lower than earlier in the day, people now had the energy to party hard. A huge moshpit was indisputable evidence of this.
Still, it didn’t take a large effort on the bands side to get people to stop for a minute to instead scream along to the songs; the aforementioned Rotten To The Core was a good example of this, where Ellsworth would scream “Rotten!” and the crowd would answer back almost as loudly but without the amplification, “to the core!”. People certainly seemed to have a good time!

The thing is, I wasn’t having a terribly good time. It wasn’t exactly bad either, but Overkill is just one of those bands which have never really left me with any special impression, and this evening’s concert wasn’t about to change that.
For once, I wasn’t particularly sad to have to cut a concert short, something we had to do due to the overlapping schedule of the Main and the Second Stage. Someday in the future I may come to regret my choice, but for now I am content in leaving Overkill to their true fans, a lot of which had shown up at Metaldays.

Setlist (incomplete):

Rotten To The Core
Electric Rattlesnake
Ironbound