Three Kinds of Metal, Precious Little Luster : Pop music: Crossover shenanigans are played at the Santa Monica Civic.

If a band gets played on metal stations, flashes its chests in metal fanzines, has its T-shirts worn by Metallica and its videos played on “Headbangers’ Ball,” you might logically assume that the band in question plays metal.

But a whole lot of punk and alternative bands have decided that shaggy locks and guitar solos aren’t so bad after all--ask Top-20 “metal” band Faith No More.

Hey, metal’s just a marketing niche, man.

And the sold-out Danzig-Soundgarden-Corrosion of Conformity concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium on Saturday night was a state-of-the-art survey of crossover shenanigans, three ways to approach sort-of-metal. Slam dancers, clean-cut college kids and extremely tattooed thrashers showed up in droves.

South Carolina’s Corrosion of Conformity, the spectacularly intense, hard-core trio that broke up a while ago, recently sprouted splendid manes of hair, recruited a few new members and became reborn as a speed-metal quintet looking for a major-label deal.

Saturday, singer Karl Agell aped the asthmatic three-note moaning of early Metallica, occasionally stopping between songs to recite a bit of apocalyptic poetry, while his guitar players alternated standard speed-metal wham-wham-wham with minor-key half-speed goth straight out of the Ozzy songbook. Agell’s famous hypnotic stare barely made it past the stage apron. These days, CoC seems less corrosive than conforming.

Hot off a Grammy nomination and the headlining spot on a tour with Voivod, Soundgarden is still less a metal band than an art band with hard-rock influences, still more influential on college radio than on commercial hard-rock stations.

Chris Cornell is one of the few guys in alternative metal who can actually sing--the standard comparison is to Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant, though Cornell’s piercing wail has a plangency Plant’s never approached--and Kim Thayil’s noisy, droning guitar sounds something like a postgraduate Fred (Sonic) Smith--dissonance that rocks.

But this was one of Soundgarden’s first gigs in a venue much larger than a club, also one of the first with a new bassist, the third within a year.

The Civic’s boomy acoustics swallowed the complex arrangements, and its huge stage swallowed its onstage chemistry--the tempos seemed close to collapsing at times. Even Cornell, the most charismatic front man in alternative rock, looked lost.

Glenn Danzig, leader of Danzig, since his earliest days in the horror-punk Misfits has had a talent for wrapping his mainstream music in extreme packaging. In fact, if you hadn’t been looking at the 15-foot horned skull the band uses as a drum riser--or listening to the hail-Satan lyrics--you might have mistaken Danzig for a vanilla fluff-metal group instead of the underground cult heroes they are.

Danzig’s growly voice, like an old blender, has two settings: hi and lo, mostly hi, which made for a monotonous set.

When he got to a chorus, big REO-Speedwagon power chords let you know. And he plugged his singles and MTV videos between numbers, just like Warrant. This was metal--of the most banal sort.

Additional review of the Georgia Satellites, F10.