Of the big three of Teutonic Thrash bands, I have always preferred Sodom and Kreator and never cared that much for Destruction. Even though their first couple of albums are actually quite good, none of their songs really made the impression that Nuclear Winter, Sodomy and Lost, Pleasure to Kill or Flag of Hate did. And as such I never saw them live either. That last bit was a solid reason to travel to Rotterdam on this dreary Monday evening to witness the last day of the Trash United 2014 Tour. The turnout was quite okay for a Monday, but it wasn’t sold out.

When I entered the venue, the Belgian thrashers of Evil Invaders were already playing. Hell, it looked and sounded much like an 80-revival party. There was a lot of energy on the stage. The band was running around like crazy. They generally play quite fast thrash, and the singer uses some extremely high squals every now and again. Nevertheless, eventually all the songs seem to sound a bit similar, and the lack of really good riffs becomes obvious. So a decent gig but that’s about it.

The second support was Lost Society from Finland. Much I said about Evil Invaders can be repeated for this band, except that musically Evil Invaders is a whole lot better than this crew. The riffs are very simple and all sound the same, the vocals are mediorce and the singer seems to like talking more than playing songs. He had also broken his guitar so it missed the high e string. And party-thrash was done before and a whole lot better by the mighty Wehrmacht, who could actually play real well and write good songs.

The eventually it was time for Destruction. After the intro, it was time for classics, starting with Total Desaster, mixed with some newer albums. The stage was filled with three huge mic stands with iron skulls welded on to them. So there was not that much space left on the stage. I guess they were used to playing bigger venues. Schmier was switched from mic to mic during the songs and the guitarist moved along the way. More than half the songs were from the 80s and the remainder was from the albums after 2000. Near the end of the set they let they audience pick songs, they had a some 10 songs on their “wishlist” and they picked whatever two the audience were shouting. Actually quite a nice gesture. They have a lot of songs to chose from so why not let the audience decide a bit too. Actually a pretty good gig, with a set list mostly aimed at the long term fans it seems.