Ozz Fest ’96 a Precious Night for Metal

The chief directives of Ozz Fest ’96 were to pay homage to festival namesake Ozzy Osbourne and generally celebrate all things metal, and the dozen acts that played the two stages to exuberant thousands at Blockbuster Pavilion on Saturday offered a stunning array of variations on the theme. The music ranged from the doom-ridden industrial squalls of Fear Factory to the Brooklyn-bred hip-hop/hard-core hybrid of Biohazard.

The most hard-line act on the bill was Slayer, the Southern California band whose devastating velocity and brutally bleak musical perspective remains something of the gold standard when it comes to speed metal. While theirs wasn’t the most adventurous set of the night--that honor belonged to Sepultura--it was the most vehement.

In its current album, “Roots,” Sepultura infuses its own gnarled and blustery sound with rootsy elements from its native Brazil. The results were striking enough, but on stage the music took on an even livelier, spontaneous edge that culminated with a percussive bang when the group brought out some half-dozen additional musicians for a rousing finale.

The industrial experiments on Danzig’s latest album, “Black Acid Evil,” didn’t fare as well. The new material benefited from the live setting, with no studio murk to obscure the songs. In the end, however, it couldn’t stand up to Danzig classics, such as “Mother” and “Dirty Black Summer,” even though they were all mostly juiced up as the bracing work of new guitarist Tommy Victor.

After all the twists and turns of the marathon, nearly 11-hour event, Osbourne’s set was a pretty conservative, if crowd-pleasing, finale comprised of the usual slew of greatest hits from his Black Sabbath days and subsequent solo career. Osbourne managed to whip the freezing crowd into a reasonable fervor--though even the most valiant attempts to ignite lighters for “Goodbye to Romance” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” were thwarted by the chill wind gusts.

With the full moon beaming down, the British rocker closed the evening, naturally, with his trademark “Bark at the Moon.” Osbourne’s innovative days may be far behind him, but Ozz Fest ’96 demonstrated that the impact of those days is still felt and appreciated among his musical progeny and his fans.