Brothers in the Dust

Geoff Carter

Saturday, July 19, 1997 | 3:44 a.m.

The thud was something to be reckoned with. You could feel it across the

street.

God only knows where Sevendust threw down prior to this night. Only a state that once sponsored aboveground nuclear testing could safely absorb this kind of subsonic ground trauma.

And that low, rolling boom wasn't the only gift Sevendust had to give. This youthful, two-tone lineup-vocalist Lajon, bassist Vince Hornsby, drummer Morgan Rose, guitarists John Connolly and Clint Lowery-may very well be the finest pure hard-rock outfit to break the sound barrier since Prong hit stride.

This Atlanta, Georgia band can shake, groove and howl with the best of them. And combining the headbanging hijinx of Metallica with the "dowhatcha want" of Fishbone, their live show is better than any comparable act that's taken the main stage of Lollapalooza in five years.

The band assayed most, if not all, of their eponymous debut record, infusing "Too Close To Hate" and "Face" with a maximum of swagger. Every three minutes or so, they pulled another body from the crowd and let them groove onstage.

Lajon was clearly just as entertained by the dancing topless women, thrashing aficionados and hard-grooving converts as the crowd was. And he took pains to call most of them back out for encore performances after security had shunted them offstage. As a result, a mini-crowd of fans built up at stage right, shaking their moneymakers from the sidelines as Sevendust went ballistic.

All told, the band delivered an overwhelming evening of blast and flash, made all the more entertaining by the their sly charm and sense of humor. After announcing the band was due to play some gigs down south, the band leapt into a letter-perfect reading of "Sweet Home Alabama."

In an era where louder tries in vain to pass for better and hard-rock posturing can be wielded by the likes of Pat Boone, it's exhilarating to discover a band that can make the sound mean something again. Maximum groove is back, and that thud has rarely felt better.