EDMONTON - It's a strange experience seeing a heavy metal singer in a death mask gushing over his fans like some country star.

Then again, Slipknot is a strange band. At their sold-out show in the Shaw Conference Centre last night, singer Corey Taylor said they wouldn't be here without "each and every one of you!"-- "here" being pretty much the most famous nine-piece heavy metal band from Des Moines, Iowa. He also said Edmonton reminds him "of what we used to be in Iowa."

Aw, that's so nice.

LOVE BEHIND THE MASKS

Add a few dozen f-words to the preceding quotes for street cred oomph, but the sentiment is clear: There was a lot of love in the room. There was also a good bit of thundering, deafening, brutal, savage (pick one adjective) heavy metal music so heavy as to rendering anything heavier virtually impossible. Slipknot sounds like two bands crashing into each other. Think about it: with nine guys they're at least 2.25 times as heavy as the average heavy band. They sound like Metallica on both steroids and LSD. They sound like Rage Against the Machine caught in the machine and ripped to shreds. Slipknot is literally a battle of the bands. Really freakin' heavy is the general idea I'm trying to get across here.

Sure, some of the material, stripped of its sinister layers, comes off as pretty standard fare for the genre --verse, verse, catchy chorus, beer keg solo, stirring audience chant, chorus out -- but it's the little extras that make this such a fun band to see live. Every day is Halloween for these guys. There's the drummer with the long fingernails, the pointy nose dude on a percussion kit that featured beer kegs and flowers, and the evil hobo guy on a second percussion kit that featured beer kegs and no flowers, but the entire rig spun around and rose into the air. Oh, and it had a TV in it, showing the out-of-their-minds delirious fans to themselves. There's the pinhead man in the back, presumably a DJ, with another on the other side of the stage, and various ghouls and goblins roaming around on guitars and bass. Have I got everybody? They're adopted numbers as stage names I can't be bothered to keep track of, and out of costume are said to be normal, well-adjusted guys with normal, well-adjusted families in Des Moines, Iowa. On stage, they work hard filling every available space with ear-splitting noise. What fun.

JACKHAMMER SONGS

Slipknot is on tour to celebrate the 10th anniversary of its first major record, self-titled, on which Corey Taylor is featured. It's been almost five years since they last pummelled Edmonton and they don't seem to have lost any momentum, or volume. The evening opened with several songs from that first record, truly groundbreaking in the jackhammer sense of the term -- including Eyeless, with its spirited if nonsensical chant: "You can't see California without Marlon Brando's eyes." No idea what that means.

The soon moved onto more recent music from albums like Vol. 3 (Subliminal Verses), which turns out to be not so subliminal, and the new recording, All Hope Is Lost. Comparing and contrasting: Before I Forget from Vol. 3 is a song about remembering something before one forgets, or maybe it's already too late, while Dead Memories (a new tune) comes off like a particularly bitter heartbreak song. You could in fact interpret any of Slipknot's tunes as heartbreak songs, rich as they are in grim metaphors, condemnation and finger-pointing at one specific, unfortunate antagonist.

Yeah, right. You wouldn't be able to understand a damned word if you didn't already know the songs. The very nature of a live Slipknot concert obliterates all meaning. You don't come to think. You come to have your thoughts drowned out by the loudest and pretty much best nine-piece heavy metal band from Des Moines, Iowa.

What's in a name? Opening the concert was the Deftones, so named because its singer Chino Moreno lulls you into a false sense of security with sweet and sensitive vocals and then screams into the mic and blows out your eardrums. It's also "def" in another sense, the playful misspelling indicating crazy hip-hop flava --and so it is with this leading rap-metal combo from California. A DJ provided various science fiction sounds to go with the thundering/deafening/brutal/savage sonic assault, though he wasn't at his post in several songs as the weird sounds continued. Trickery! Well, whatever. The band pounded out a satisfying, if somewhat sludgy set, with Moreno's showmanship a pleasure to watch, even if he was a bit giddy.

"Do you know what I'm saying?" he shouted at one point, apropos of some deep message in a previous song, then sighed, "Too much fun. Too much motherf---ing fun."

We couldn't agree more.