OliCritical

Last friday night I went to parque da Bela Vista, Lisbon, where the city of Rock 2012 was established. It was the first day of Rock In Rio - the metal day. In a festival with such great names like Lenny Kravitz, Smashing Pumpkins, Offspring, Stevie Wonder or even Bruce Springsteen, the choice was hard but I could never lose the performances of Metallica and Mastodon, two of my favorite bands.

I entered at about 4:30pm and waited until 7:00pm for the first concert: Sepultura with Tambours du Bronx. I have to say that although I didn’t enjoy very much their performance mainly because of the vocals by Derrick Green I really liked the combination of their music and the french group’ awesome rythms. When they ended I could only think about Mastodon!

With the cover of their recent album The Hunter in the background, Mastodon took the stage at 8:25pm. The thing about Mastodon is that people who don’t know anything about the band will of course be a little bit confused with their music style. They are more than just one more metal band. They mess with your brain in a unique way making you want to hear them for hours.

Although short and with only two songs from past albums it was a concert to remember. The setlist was: “Black Tongue”, “Crystal Skull”, “Dry Bone Valley”, “Thickening”, “Octopus Has No Friends”, “Stargasm”, “Blasteroid” , “All The Heavy Lifting”, “Spectrelight”, “Curl Of The Burl”, “Bedazzled Fingernails” and of course ending with an apotheotic “Blood and Thunder”, leading the crowd into a frenzy. 

Next was Evanescence so… it was dinner time. I only saw one or two songs at the end because I was trying to get a good place to see what everyone wanted to see: Metallica.   

It was as usual a phenomenal show. Starting at 23:30pm, Metallica was received with thousands of applause and started with “Hit the Ligths”, “Master of Puppets”, “Fuel”, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” (awesome bass line!) and the song “Hell and Back” from their last EP Beyond Magnetic. Note that this last song I mentioned was the one that the majority (including me) didn’t enjoy so much. But after, Black Album in its entirely. “The Struggle Within”, “My Friend Of Misery”, “The God That Failed”, “Of Wolf And Man”, “Nothing Else Matters”, “Through The Never”, “Don’t Tread On Me”, “Wherever I May Roam”, “The Unforgiven”, “Holier Than Thou”, “Sad But True” and finally “Enter Sandman”! When we all thought it couldn’t get any better they played as encore “Fight Fire With Fire” with lots of pyrotecnical stuff; then “One” with wonderful lasers and smoke all over the place; and to finish the classic “Seek And Destroy” where dozens of black balls were thrown to the crowd.

It was a fantastic metal night and I was even able to get a Robert Trujillo pick! :)

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