Bay Area thrashers
Testament
arrived at the 1987
Dynamo Open Air
Festival as relative unknowns, bolstered only by a startlingly mature debut album named
The Legacy
and boatloads of promise; they left conquering heroes, having handily converted the European masses assembled there with their accomplished musicianship and ferocious live show. So successful was the band's performance, in fact, that their label
Megaforce
rush-released the
Live at Eindhoven
EP in Europe -- thereby perpetuating four of the band's most potent melodic thrashers --
"Over the Wall,"
"Burnt Offerings,"
"Do or Die,"
and
"Apocalyptic City"
-- in all their vicious on-stage glory, and often at even faster speeds than were managed in the studio. A final, fifth track, named
"Reign of Terror,"
was also tacked onto the end, as though it too had been performed live, but was in fact a rare outtake from
sessions, which helped make the original
EP a high-selling import in America over the next few years. Fast forward some 20 years, though, and
's complete, uniquely inspired set from that day was finally released in its entirety by
Prosthetic Records
; bringing the song count to nine, plus a guitar solo from teen wizard
Alex Skolnick
and arguably doubling the overall excitement in the bargain. Among the additions, there's the surprise of an as-yet unreleased
"Disciples of the Watch"
-- soon to become the centerpiece of
's massive sophomore studio effort,
The New Order
-- and three more classics from
, in
"The Haunting,"
"First Strike Is Deadly,"
and an almost impossibly fast-and-heavy tornado-de-force through
"Curse of the Legions of Death."
In the end, the only measure of misfortune afflicting
's well-deserved upgrade and reissue may be the sense of irrelevance with which the music-buying public views live albums, in general, a decade into the third millennium.
's
flies too far away from the mainstream to change that, but it sure as hell might help. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia