Music Review | 'Gigantour'

UNIONDALE, N.Y., Sept. 28 — Megadeth temporarily dissolved in 2002, after 19 years, when its leader, Dave Mustaine, suffered some nasty nerve damage in his left arm. As he took time off to rehabilitate, he must have noticed that Ozzfest, the metal tour run by Ozzy Osbourne, was doing rather well. Once back in action, he led his own large-bill metal tour, called Gigantour, with Megadeth as headliner.

Kirk Condyles for The New York Times
Propulsion and pyrotechnics: Dave Mustaine and Megadeth led the Gigantour show on Thursday night at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y.





Now in its second go-round, Gigantour is a funny proposition for Megadeth. It presents the group as a kind of metal apotheosis — even with more successful younger bands on the bill, it’s the one everyone’s really come to see, the band with most power and credibility among the middle-aged and the teenagers. But in a larger context it presents the group as part of a trend, following the path that aging hard-rock bands must take to keep rolling. Slayer has been headlining its own similar tour, called Unholy Alliance; Korn has been doing it with the Family Values tour since 1998.


Tickets for this show were $43 for eight bands — about half the price of an Ozzfest ticket. The theme of Gigantour is guitar expertise: no bands are allowed that haven’t attained a sufficient level of technique. By a certain logic of hard-line metal aesthetics, that’s maintaining quality. You wonder, though, if it’s also reducing the audiences.


On Thursday Gigantour needed only half the capacity of Nassau Coliseum. A crowd of this size would have comfortably filled a medium-sized club: Roseland, or maybe even Irving Plaza. It felt sparser in a hockey stadium, with particle-board laid over the rink. But, whatever. A cold room, bossy security detail, sponsorship by an Xbox game (“Gears of War”), strobe-effect stage lighting and pyrotechnics: this must be metal in 2006.


In Megadeth’s newest lineup Mr. Mustaine mostly plays rhythm guitar, next to the lead guitarist, Glen Drover. Their styles are very different, and when they traded solos, the juxtaposition could be fascinating. Mr. Mustaine was one of speed-metal’s originators, and his double-time riffs are propulsive; bending over his guitar, long blond tresses hanging down, he gives his solos the direct feeling of wrestling with the music as he plays it, with some chaos and aggression. Mr. Drover has a bigger, brighter sound, and his style tends to be more licks-and-scales-oriented, each solo forming perfect and rather dull symmetry; he sounds more abstracted from the product.


The band played songs from across its catalog, many about the shame of not living up to your promises, and suggesting violent retribution of one kind or another. It was a 90-minute immersion in a style that felt old and decorous, sprinting in its verses and ballooning into big-melody choruses.
The supporting lineup could give you a fast education in the music’s last 25 years, including the early thrash-metal band Overkill; the Swedish progressive-metal band Opeth, which gets into sophisticated, dense and gorgeous sonic territory; and the latest metal band to crack the Billboard Top 10, Lamb of God, from Virginia.


Lamb of God occupies another hard-rock position that was first struck shortly after the invention of speed-metal: the equal balance between hardcore punk and metal. It has become the new standard-bearing band for that crossover area, and live, it transmits the idea constantly, musically and otherwise.


The band’s guitar solos were baroque and technique-heavy; meanwhile, its singer Randy Blythe, short-haired and skinny and not your typical metal guy, threw his middle-pitch voice down into the metal growl, making specific between-song appeals both to the hardcore kids and the metalheads in the crowd.


Gigantour continues through Oct. 8, with shows at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., tonight and the House of Blues in Atlantic City tomorrow night; www.gigantour.com.

Source: New York Times

Foros de Rock y Heavy Metal