After seeing Twisted Sister playing a great show at this summer’s Arrow Rock Festival, I was a happy man when I received the Live In The Astoria CD/DVD twinpack. Their performance at London’s Astoria Theatre took place at a hot summer’s night back in 2004 and it was filmed for a pay-per-view special. When the band had the opportunity to look at the footage, a couple of years later, it brought back the heat, passion, intensity and the memories about the great audience participation though. All the members agreed that this was one of their most memorable shows up-to-date and they had to share it with the fans.

After watching the show several times I definitely understand why they wanted to release this show on DVD (and CD), ‘cause it is indeed a great performance. From opener ‘What You Don’t Know’ until the encore, which contains ‘Come Out And Play’ and ‘S.M.F.’, you feel that same passion, intensity and heat the band and audience must have felt that night. The band shows it was in a great shape that night and especially vocalist Dee Snider is on fire. He does a great job singing the songs, but the best parts of the whole show are the parts in between the songs where he’s bitching against record companies and promoters for example. The only annoying part for the viewer of this DVD are the censured names of the companies and persons during his speeches.
 

The interaction between the audience is also indeed very intense and that’s best noticeable during songs like ‘We're Not Gonna Take It’, ‘I Wanna Rock’ and ‘S.M.F.’. At first I thought about telling you which songs are my favorites on this releases, but then I realized it would undermine the power of the rest of the setlist. When you like Twisted Sister or hard rock / heavy metal in general you should definitely check this release out, for it simply rocks! Live At The Astoria can’t make the hunger to see them live again disappear, but it certainly eases the period between two live shows.