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Stoking Metal’s Fire in the Heat of Summer
HOLMDEL, N.J., Aug. 16 — It seemed like a fairly ordinary day on Ozzy Osbourne’s annual Ozzfest tour, held this year at the PNC Bank Arts Center.
Musclebound bruisers mixed with pallid lurkers and affectionate couples and aging obsessives. Depending on your preference, this traveling heavy-metal festival can provide hours of chaos and decadence, or hours of family fun. (Or both: at least one sturdy-looking paterfamilias in the crowd was observed drinking beer until his bladder was full, and then — uh-oh — drinking some more.) Guitars were throttled, devil horns were thrown, invitations to turn the parking lot into a high-contact dance floor were issued from the stage. The usual, in other words.
Sadly, Thursday’s show wasn’t quite as run-of-the-mill as it seemed. On Friday, the New Jersey State Police confirmed that two men who passed out at the concert had died, both from heart attacks; the police said they believed both men had ingested alcohol, marijuana and cocaine . There were also 83 arrests at the concert, many for under-age drinking. With a tally like that, it’s hard to argue that the concert was anything but a disaster, regardless of the music.
It would be absurd, though, to try finding a connection between the tragedy and the music itself. Of course Ozzfest draws rowdy young people (what kind of concert would you expect rowdy young people to attend?), but the problems this year probably had less to do with content and more to do with crowd control. In fact, the police have been fighting under-age drinking at the center all summer long; there were more arrests — 90 — at a recent concert there by the peaceable quasi jam band O.A.R.
Even before Thursday’s concert, this had been a tricky year for Ozzfest. The tour is free this year, for the first time, though free doesn’t mean easy. Fans could get a pair of tickets by visiting the Web sites of corporate sponsors, or by buying Mr. Osbourne’s new album, “Black Rain” (Epic). Prime seats were — and, in some cities, still are — available as part of V.I.P. packages, with prices starting at $300. And in New Jersey, parking added another $25.
In February, during the initial Ozzfest announcement, Mr. Osbourne’s wife, Sharon Osbourne, explained that none of the bands would be paid. Perhaps that explained the rather thin lineup. While previous editions have included big draws ranging from System of a Down to Iron Maiden, this year’s No. 2 act was Lamb of God, a popular and widely respected band but not an arena-filler.
People showed up, regardless, lured by the Ozzfest brand, and by the chance to watch Mr. Osbourne warble some old songs and new ones. He’s 58, and he sounds pretty awful, but he does work hard, spraying audience members with foam, clapping awkwardly along (on the 1 and 3, not the 2 and 4), and giving the guitarist Zakk Wylde plenty of space to unleash screaming harmonics. Fans even cheered when Mr. Osbourne broke out the love songs: at Ozzfest, he is the only performer allowed to sing a piano ballad.
Many of the rest of the acts split along national lines. Some of the American ones seemed to be working in the shadow of Pantera, the band that perfected guttural, rhythmic metal in the early 1990s. Lamb of God (performing with a banner that read, “Pure American Metal”) unleashed one corrosive assault after another; Hatebreed’s set was full of hard-stomping half-speed mosh parts, as well as motivational speeches from the lead barker, Jamey Jasta (he explained that the band’s 2006 album, “Supremacy,” was about “gaining supremacy about that person inside yourself, because we can be our own worst enemies); Static-X delivered one uninspired rhythmic riff after another.
Then there was the international contingent, promoting a weirder vision of metal. Members of the Finnish band Lordi, notorious for (somehow) winning the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest, have found a pleasantly stupid way to become monsters of rock: they dress up like monsters and sing ridiculous songs like “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” They also discovered the key to winning over Ozzfest fans: constant pyrotechnics.
Fans who missed two of the weirdest and best acts on the bill, the Taiwanese black-metal band Chthonic and the shredding, Egypt-obsessed Nile, get a second chance: both are scheduled to play the B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, in Times Square, on Tuesday night. But there’s no such luck for fans who missed Behemoth, a Polish group that earned a respectful but slightly puzzled reaction. The members have found a way to combine the brutal clarity of death metal with the eerie atmospherics of black metal. On a day not likely (for more than one reason) to be remembered for music, Behemoth sounded great, and provided a bizarre and deeply satisfying spectacle: four face-painted Poles paying fearsome tribute to the old gods in a New Jersey parking lot.
