Jägermeister Music Tour

“To the Threshold” by Hatebreed, from Supremacy (Roadrunner Records):

Since launching in 2002, the biannual Jägermeister Music Tour has favored extremely heavy acts (with Slayer headlining twice) alongside rock-radio fixtures (Disturbed, Drowning Pool). For its past six outings, tour organizers selected loud, melodic headliners, but this bill returns to the hard stuff. Hatebreed, which got its first Jäger shot on the 2003 tour, plays the kind of crushing hardcore that makes kids windmill their limbs and Vin Diesel jump out of planes. (The group’s signature song, “I Will Be Heard,” accompanied a skydiving sequence in xXx.) Type O Negative combines sludgy doom riffs and rumbling bass vocals with thrash outbursts and disarmingly breezy psychedelic jams. Singer Peter Steele alternates between goth caricatures and depressive pieces, but his stage banter always showcases his dark humor. Powered by the wailing falsetto of Cam Pipes, 3 Inches of Blood revisits Iron Maiden-era power metal, with harmonic guitars and Dungeons and Dragons lyrics.