After a short break it was again time for some music at the MTV's Headbanger's Ball tour, and this time the turn had gone to Agnostic Front. They are a band which I haven't really heard before (for no particular reason) but have heard about so I was interested in seeing what they would give us.
As I had understood it, the band came from New York, and as the show began it stood clear to me that I was right on the stop on that one. Their style was very much of an old-school early to mid 90ies New Yorker sound, similar to that of bands like Biohazard and Life Of Agony, even though the roots of Agnostic Front can be traced much further back than that, to the early 80ies in fact.

Of course, the show is usually very intense for this kind of band, and here Agnostic Front delivered on full scale. The crowd had grown considerably since As We Fight had played, and now it seemed like someone had given the ok to party.
A big old mosh had started in the middle of the floor, there were crowd-surfers and even a couple of people who went on stage. Even the guards, who are usually pretty strict in this sort of place, were very tolerant with the crowds behavior, and let them sing along for a while and then stage dive back into the action on the floor.

The partying was also very intense on the stage, and you could tell that this was the sort of thing that these guys lives and breathes for. Even though singer Roger Miret excused the bands lack of energy at one point, explaining that there was some illness going round, it was hard to see what he was talking about, and Agnostic Front was definitely the liveliest band to see perform during the whole night. Especially Mike Gallo on bass-guitar impressed me with a cool stage-presence.

The only minus I really recall from the show has actually nothing to with the band itself; it was a very poor light work, with almost no frontlights, which at several times made the band look just like dark shadows on stage. Then again, this small mistake was easy enough to overlook, as the band still had the whole room in the palms of their hands. Literally. At one point Roger Miret just said jump, and this set half the crowd or more flying in the air all at once.
Agnostic Front also had an impressive amount of songs to play for us, and even though they had stricken five songs from their setlist, they still performed a 21 songs long concert for us. Impressive! For those of you who wonder, the stricken songs were New Jack, I Live It, Pauly The Dog, Toxic Shock and Public Assistance.

Setlist:

Fall Of The Parasite
Outraged
Eliminator
Dead To Me
For My Family
Friend Or Foe
Victim In Pain
All Is Not Forgotten
Peace
Crucified
Your Mistake
Blind Justice
Last Warning
Warriors
Black And Blue
Gotta Go
Something's Gotta Give
Riot, Riot, Upstart
Police State
Take Me Back
Addiction