Kick Out the Jams: Slipknot at the House of Blues, May 8

Slipknot at the House of Blues, May 8

The problem with sold-out metal shows is there's always a gaggle of fools leaping around like Neanderthal men and performing impromptu air guitar solos and smacking everyone around them in the grille with their greasy split ends. Perhaps this is why heavy metal fans seem so angry as a group. They lay out all their ducats to check out a show, only to find out how intolerable it is to be in a room full of people just like them.

But if the nu-metal spectacular Saturday at the House of Blues is any indication, there's no such worry at a Slipknot show, where shaved heads are the coiff du jour and baseball caps are the preferred headgear. So much for the much-touted homemade Slipknot masks; if you didn't know better, you might have thought it was 1999 and the sweaty minions were chanting "Bizkit" instead of "Slipknot." But the audience was most certainly invoking the masked men from Des Moines, who took the stage around 9 p.m. as the crowd performed something that approximated a collective "Om." Of course, this mutual calm was not to last, and with the industrial crunch of "(Sic)," Slipknot charged headlong into 90 minutes of shrieking guitar carnage.

Although there were few of the antics--death-defying stage dives, public immolation, projectile vomiting--glorified in the lore of Slipknot shows past, there were moments of genuine intrigue, such as when #8 (frontman Corey Taylor) would smash his head with the microphone or any time #5 (Shawn "Clown" Crahan) would thump the keg on his drum kit with an aluminum baseball bat. Most amazing of all, though, wasn't the band's "Jackass"-inspired stunts but its musical skill. The bastard progeny of Iowa's most promising metal bands, Slipknot displayed surprising dexterity as it chugged through "Disasterpiece," "Purity" and "The Heretic Anthem" ("If you're 555, then I'm 666"). A formidable mosh pit raged on the floor of the House of Blues throughout, and even though many fans were forcibly removed by security, few if any were seen noodling on an imaginary guitar. For that reason alone, Slipknot deserves a double devil-horned salute.--Newt Briggs