http://www.sun-sentinel.com

Slipknot leads heavy lineup at Mayhem Festival

Masked rockers not the only heavyweights at Mayhem Festival in West Palm Beach
By Patrick MacDonald | Seattle Times
July 30, 2008


What will be the big news from the West Palm Beach installment of the 30-city Mayhem Festival, which kicked off earlier this month outside Seattle?

The new masks of headliner Slipknot?

Disturbed stealing the show with songs from their new album Indestructible?

Or Mastodon stomping all the other bands with music from their acclaimed recent release Blood Mountain?


Heavy-metal and hard-rock fans around the world will be checking out the festival's progress, because the tour boasts the loudest, heaviest, hardest-hitting lineup of the summer.

Slipknot headlines because the nine-piece out of Des Moines, Iowa, has sold the most albums of all the bands on the bill — more than 10 million in its nine-year recording history. By performing masked, and never revealing their faces, Slipknot can not only change personnel at will but also never seem to grow old.

But Disturbed is the biggest band on the bill at the moment, because Indestructible debuted in June at No. 1 in Billboard.It's the Chicago quartet's third consecutive No. 1 album. Their 2000 debut, The Sickness, didn't make it to No. 1 but has sold more than 4 million. Disturbed is unique in that some songs by lead singer David Draiman are about growing up as an Orthodox Jew, which is why he's the one guy in the band who eats kosher and doesn't have tattoos.

Mastodon is breathing down both bands' necks, because the Atlanta group has been getting all the good press lately, including having Blood Mountain listed at No. 9 in Rolling Stone's Top 50 Essential Albums of the Year.

The magazine called the album "the most acclaimed, most innovative, most iron-tusked and just plain heaviest metal album since Metallica ran out of gas."

Also on the bill is Black Tide, the young Latino quartet from Miami that Rolling Stone called "metal's new teen titans." Lead singer Gabriel Garcia is only 15.