POP MUSIC REVIEW : Priest Fans Get Message . . . (if Any) : At the Sports Arena, this heavy-metal band doesn’t seem to know whether to come down on the side of good <i> or</i> evil.

The ruling in the recent Judas Priest trial in Nevada was curious. The judge decided that the English heavy-metal band was not liable for the untimely deaths of the plaintiffs’ sons, because the supposedly suicide-inducing subliminal messages in the contested song were not intentionally planted. In saying that, however, the judge strongly implied that there were subliminal messages in the music, but that these were unintentional.

If that was indeed what he meant to get across, the judge, then, would seem to go along with the very small school of paranormal researchers which believes that subliminals can indeed be inadvertent, that a communicator’s true feelings may come out under the surface of or even backwards within the conscious message being expressed.

To most of us, that possibility seems as unlikely as the chances of Kevin Nealon’s Mr. Subliminal character on “Saturday Night Live”--the one who always sneaks rapid-fire buzzwords expressing his real intent in-between the benign lines--having an effect on people in reality.

Still, at the Priest show (overlong) Thursday night at the Sports Arena, as on their long string (toomany) of albums, there was such a lack of an overt, conscious message from the band (pointless) that you had to wonder if perhaps the veteran group (longinthetooth) must have some kind of philosophy (doubtit) that it sneaks in somewhere, subliminally or otherwise.

Reading one of their lyric sheets (whybother) one might wonder if these guys are barely capable of fleshing out a covert idea in a song, let alone a cleverly disguised one. Their set’s climactic song, the new (notimproved) album’s “Painkiller” (earplugs) , seems to be about a cycle-riding Antichrist-like figure, but it’s impossible to tell if Priest is endorsing the bad fellow or warning us about him.

Although their songs usually deal in the vague (fuzzyminded) imagery of violence, the occult and/or heavy machinery, this group doesn’t seem to want to ever come down on the side of either good or evil. Either one would be too sectarian for such a decidedly crowd-pleasing (pandering) band.

As a result, the image (bland) they put forth on stage is also somewhat nebulous. Unlike a newer group like Danzig, which at least has the courage of its devil-exalting convictions, Judas Priest (oldhat) seems to toy with the icons of evil (pretentious) purely for entertainment’s sake. Even stripped of the suit and tie he wore at the trial and “hellbent for leather” (callBobBarker) once more, singer Rob Halford comes off as such a nice chap that you too easily imagine him at home in an English country manor (toorich) just as surely as you once pictured Alice Cooper playing golf.

Loud, blinding flashbombs (ouch) went off at regular intervals, but there is some real flash in the band’s music, too, to be fair. Judas Priest is made up of excellent players and terrible songwriters, and if a metal band is going to be one or the other, it’d better be the former. Though Priest was a seminal metal group, it’s obviously now being influenced itself by its speed-metal progeny (catchup) , and has the chops to compete on that level. New drummer Scott Travis brings in the requisite double-bass-drum triplets, and guitarist K.K. Downing plays more notes per second (toomany) than most of the rising speed-obsessed hotshots aching to fill his shoes.

But still doing (bloodless) songs about Jack the Ripper, eerie sentinels and “a feast of flesh and blood” after all these (tiresome) years? The real spook story here is that Judas Priest is like the portrait of Dorian Gray, for 15 years now aging while the core audience for its juvenile themes (growup) has stayed below voting age. There’s nothing mysterious about the fact that most veteran metal fans want (letsgohome) to move on to something with a little more meat.

Subliminals? Nah, probably not.

The much-overrated band Megadeth closed its opening set with a metal rendition of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” complete with original “I wanna beeee / Anarchy” chorus. Wanna-be is right. Judas Priest, Megadeth and Testament also play tonight at the San Diego Sports Arena.