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Metal heads rock at Mayhem Festival
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
By RAY KELLY

HARTFORD - For metal heads, the yellow brick road now leads past Ozzfest and toward Mayhem.

The Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival brought the knee-buckling, deafening sound of 14 hard rockin' bands to the New England Dodge Music Center on Saturday night.

The music was spread across nine hours and three stages with headliners Slipknot and Disturbed closing the night on the main stage.

With the paring back of Ozzy Osbourne's long-running Ozzfest to a single date this year, Mayhem is poised to become an annual event. The 30-city tour closes its successful run tonight in Darien Lake, NY.

Some of the more than 20,000 fans arrived at the Dodge Music Center early in the afternoon to catch acts such as Suicide Silence, Machine Head and Underoath perform 30-minute sets on the smaller stages. However, much of the crowd arrived after twilight to hear Slipknot and Disturbed.

The presence of Disturbed on Mayhem Festival's heavy metal lineup has rankled some.

With a melodic hard rock sound that has earned them three No. 1, Disturbed has been criticized by metal fans for not rocking hard enough.

Singer David Draiman and his band mates blunted such criticism at the start with their opening number, a powerhouse version of "Perfect Insanity."

Other numbers from the Chicago rockers' latest album, "Indestructible," quickly followed, including "Inside the Fire," "Divide" and the title track.

A blistering cover of Genesis' "Land of Confusion" that Phil Collins and the boys could never hope to match, as well as a screeching "Down with the Sickness" from Disturbed's 2000 debut album, highlighted their 13-song set.

Slipknot closed the night with a highly theatrical, though unimpressive, hour-long set.

Pyrotechnics and spinning drum kits aside, it is hard to take eight guys wearing silly Halloween masks, pounding on trash cans and sputtering unintelligible lyrics seriously. But judging from the thousands of fans pumping their fists in the air and banging their heads to the din, somebody obviously does.

For better or worse, Slipknot's set captured different phases of their recording career, including "Prosthectics" from their first album for Roadrunner Records in 1999 to "Psychosocial" from their forthcoming disc, "All Hope is Gone," due in stores on Aug. 26.