Who'll have the heaviest metal on "Mayhem" tour?
What will be the big news from the kickoff of the first 30-city "Mayhem Festival" tour Wednesday at White River?
The new masks of headliner Slipknot?
Disturbed stealing the show with songs from their new, No. 1 album "Indestructible"?
Or Mastodon stomping all the other bands with music from their acclaimed new album "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 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. The band members' new masks were revealed by spinner.com on Tuesday for 24 hours, but will be worn for the first time onstage at White River.
But Disturbed is the biggest band on the bill at the moment, because their new "Indestructible" album debuted at No. 1 in Billboard three weeks ago, and is still in the top 10. 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, calling it "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.
36 Crazyfists, named after a Jackie Chan flick, was formed in Anchorage in 1994, and is the biggest rock band to come out of Alaska. They've played here a lot, especially after relocating to Portland.
Other bands on the bill: Dragonforce, Machine Head, Underoath, Walls of Jericho, Five Finger Death Punch, Suicide Silence, Airbourne, The Red Chord and freestyle motocross team The Metal Mulisha.
Patrick MacDonald: 206-464-2312
or pmacdonald@seattletimes.com
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