Annihilator - Live at Masters of Rock (2009)

Live at Masters of Rock is the second Annihilator live album I've come across, and unlike the first it's a singular performance that coherently captures this particular era of the band. Now, I'm not actually a fan of most of this material, so it's not something I expected to walk away from with much of a positive impression, but I can say at the very least it is profession and polished and comes pretty close to the band's studio output in production. Dave Padden's vocals show a slight less of the scattering of styles and range in this setting, but he gets the job done, pumping the Czechia crowd up where needed and even hammering away on the rhythm guitar. I've got nothing much to say about tracks like "Clown Parade" or "Operation Annihilation", but it's this 90s and beyond era of material which dominates the first half of the track list so I suffered through it to get to what I hoped would be the good bits...

And there are a fair amount of cuts represented from the first two albums, so Annihilator was well aware of its bread and butter. Instrumentally, "Fun Palace" and "Alice in Hell" remains two of the highlights, and Padden does have the range here to cover it all, but of course his vocals don't have the original charisma that was translated across on the earlier live album. He doesn't cock it up, the guitars are super clean, allowing those melodies to pop through, and the rhythm section is ample enough to offer the concrete support for Waters' playing to sit into. And you're getting "Wicked Mystic", and "Phantasmagoria", and "W.T.Y.D.", and that's all good until they close the performance with the pure hard rock number with "Shallow Grave" that in my opinion belongs absolutely nowhere in this set list, but more in a cover band for AC/DC or Accept. That's quite a deflation after finally being bombarded with a bunch of the songs you WANTED to hear, and if you were listening through the whole album, you already had to earn. Was this track a bit hit in Europe or something?

Ultimately, it's not a recording I ever need to hear again, simply because I'm not invested in the material, but there are far, far worse live representations you can get out there. This one is just your average, well-produced fare from a large European festival and largely holds to the standards of such products. It's nothing more than fine.

Verdict: Indifference [5.75/10]

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