It’s a slightly grizzled-looking crowd fronting up at the Waterloo Hotel this evening. Testament, 20-year veterans of the thrash metal scene, have drawn scores of equally venerable fans out of the woodwork. Weather-beaten metalheads in patchwork denim jackets with long hair, scraggly beards and lined faces litter the Waterloo’s barn-style live-music area, soaking up cheap beer and raucous music.

First band to hit the narrow stage are Sedition, and though they try hard to rev the crowd, their efforts go largely unrewarded. Maybe this reviewer is tainted by the uninspired cover of Iron Maiden’s Two Minutes to Midnight early on, but the vocals are merely workmanlike, the guitar solos arrive predictably, and it all chugs along … nicely. Damnation by faint praise for a metal act. So, although there’s a small knot of dedicated fans over by the right-hand speaker stack, the best response they seem to receive from everyone else is a bunch of nodding heads and polite disinterest.

Their final song, Hell Raiser, shows off the band at its best – a punchy effort buoyed by the added vocal grunt of their former singer. In fact, with his guest slot he almost steals the limelight from everyone else on stage.

Minus Life immediately crank the intensity. The tempo is faster, the action thrashier, and vocalist Scott Moss is going mental – whipping about like an epileptic on acid. While the keyboards seem to be over-cranked early on, it’s not a distraction, and Dark Child of Hate and Manipulation of the Masses - propelled into the stratosphere by ear-shattering kickdrums – really go off.

At this point proceedings are interrupted when Moss’s microphone goes kaput. There’s an uncomfortable break while one of the sound guys is harangued into providing a replacement. Can the guys recover momentum? Bodies on Fire and 1000 Funerals incontrovertibly prove they can, and by the end people at the front are thrashing round in a wild orgy of flying hair.

The subsequent wait for Testament is interminable. Restless, the crowd starts chanting for the band while roadies wander the stage repeatedly checking equipment. Eventually, (finally!) Testament appear. And for all the world – with their long, wild hair and rugged features – it’s as though prime examples of Cro-Magnon Man have climbed en-masse from the grave to entertain us.

What follows is worth the wait. Not simply the previous 40 minutes or so of shuffling feet and staring at an empty stage, but the whole 20-plus years it’s taken Testament to reach Australian shores for the first time.

They open with a ripping version of The Preacher. Vocalist Chuck Billy, plus guitarists Alex Skolnick and Eric Peterson and bassist Greg Christian immediately push forward and loom ominously at the front of the narrow stage. And whether by chance or by virtue of their decades of performing experience, the way they’ve positioned themselves – the four tight abreast, right up over the foldback speakers on the very stage edge – feels intensely intimate. At the very rear, Nick Barker (the only one not a member of the classic line-up) is almost invisible behind his massive kit.

It’s immediately obvious that Billy’s vocal chops are tuned to perfection tonight as he screams and growls his way through the song. The crowd laps it up, and when the others step back, giving Skolnick the limelight to solo, excitement turns to frenzy. And so it should – the man’s hands are a blur flicking across the strings and up and down the fretboard. Just behind, Billy mimes air guitar against his 18-inch hand-held microphone boom with all the enthusiasm of a teenage fan and waggles his tongue lewdly at the punters.

It’s a tactic they repeat throughout the night to superb effect. Sometimes it’s Peterson stepping forward, more often it’s Skolnick, and occasionally it’s both to play as a harmonised duo. The latter, exemplified by the very end of The Haunting, produces the kind of virtuoso shredding to make even the most reserved fan drool uncontrollably.

Over the course of the next hour or so, we receive a loud and enthusiastic personal tour of Testament’s massive musical vault. The emphasis is on the classics, and from The New Order’s hard ‘n heavy chorus and the shiver-inducing eerieness of Electric Crown’s piercing intro and refrain to the thunderous drumming of Practice What You Preach, it’s a wild ride full of devil horns, slamming bodies and flying hair. And while other bands of similar pedigree might resent having to work through their classics, Testament show every sign of that they’re having as much fun now as they were when they first hit the stage in 1983.

Wedged in the centre of the set are three shuddering songs from The Gathering. DNR (Do not Resuscitate) features some jaw dropping fingerwork as Peterson shreds his way up the fret, peaking on the actual body of the guitar. However, True Believer, which Billy dedicates to the crowd, is the best of them, even if he momentarily confuses Brisbane with Melbourne. He’s puzzled by the crowd’s derisive hooting, but doesn’t pick up his error until Skolnick nudges him before the next song. At which point he can hardly apologise enough, telling everyone how much it always irked him to go see a band only for the dickhead frontman to mix up where they were playing.

“That fucking guy’s me tonight,” he pronounces sadly.

He redeems himself with a soulful, melancholy version of The Legacy full of slow, hypnotic grooves and melodic moments. And Skolnick’s mid-song solo is exquisite. Thrash anthem Into the Pit follows and as dozens of people recklessly charge to the front, the pit turns into something like a piranha feeding frenzy.

Fittingly, Testament finish with live staple Over the Wall but the crowd is nowhere near ready for the end. Soon, the band is back to punch out Alone in the Dark, expertly working the crowd into humming the chorus line over and again. Another classic, Disciples of the Watch, concludes the night’s entertainment with an entirely appropriate slampit. Utterly smashing, and as Billy and co promise to return to these shores much sooner next time – with new material in tow – you can’t help but feel it can’t come quickly enough.