Package tours can certainly be hit or miss combinations. On one hand, they give fans the opportunity to see bands that would be unable to tour on their own; something especially important in the United States where there isn’t a tradition of big heavy metal festivals like in Europe. On the other hand, there’s less stage time for those bands and the opportunity for clashing egos runs rampant: witness the fight between Bruce Dickinson and Sharon Osbourne at the end of Ozzfest last year.
However, despite the potential for problems, package tours seem to be all the rage amongst metal gods these days; besides Ozzfest, the festival run by Ozzy Osbourne and his wife Sharon that’s entering its 10 year this year, there’s Gigantour, started in 2005 by Dave Mustaine, fronting the current incarnation of Megadeth. This year, there’s another tour competing for fan dollars: the Unholy Alliance Tour, run by the uncompromising masters of extreme thrash Slayer. With Slayer as the foundation, the tour organizers hope to make Unholy Alliance an annual event in the US and Europe, featuring the best bands out there."
Unfortunately for Slayer, two of the bands they chose to tour with them were intent on blowing any competing performance out of the water. While Thine Eyes Bleed and Lamb of God offered fairly pedestrian opening sets of thrash-influenced death metal, Mastodon and Children of Bodom played music that made the competition look like a bunch of fourteen-year-olds in a garage band.
Mastodon and the Wall of Sound
Half the band looks like they go out and hunt the mastodons they named their band after. They have an awesome stage backdrop, with two Indonesian demons in the clouds hunting a sperm whale in the midst of a stormy sea. They sing songs about hunting those same sperm whales and somehow this is very, very metal. All-in-all, Mastodon is a very intense band and put on very intense set, dominating the cavernous space of The Theater at the Continental Airlines Arena with a wall of ear-crushing sound. So awesome was the power of their metal that they did a better job of involving the entire crowd, scattered throughout the general admission floor and the seats, into their set than any other act I saw that night.
Children of Bodom, Master Showmen
For sheer showmanship, however, one needs look no further than the second band of the night, Finland’s Children of Bodom. Led by guitarist/singer Alexi Laiho, Bodom’s high-energy mix of progressive metal and thrash rocked in ways far beyond the normal expectations for an opening act. While all five members of the band have great chops and good presence, Laiho, who’s also known as Wildchild, lived up to his moniker, dancing and jumping around the stage, playing high speed runs while popping his head out from under the keyboardist’s arm and generally doing his best to steal the show. Of all of the bands that played that night, I thought Bodom gave the best performance, in large part due to how they worked the crowd.
Slayer Fails to Impress
With Slayer’s reputation as a premiere live act, I expected a performance that would not only blow away anything else I’d seen that night, but rank among the top shows I’d ever seen. We’re talking Slayer here – they’re metal gods and by God, seeing them perform should rank up there with the finest things life has to offer. Unfortunately, even getting past the hype, Slayer’s set wasn’t anything to get excited about. It might be because Tom Araya had gall bladder surgery not long before the tour and he was still recovering. Maybe it was because Araya chose to do what little introductions he did do exactly the same way he did on Decade of Aggression (1991), to the point where I knew Slayer was about to play "Mandatory Suicide" because Araya dedicated the song to those of friends who had come back from Iraq.
