POP MUSIC REVIEW : . . . And Metallica for All : Metal Madmen Give Mainstream Fling a Full-Blown Tilt

Metallica is widely acknowledged to be the best metal band in the world, the group that stripped the bloated corpse of stadium rock to its snarling skull and reinvented the metal riff as something closer to the drum rudiment than to the sloppy blues lick.

On last year’s album “Metallica,” it streamlined its rambling, multi-sectional song structures into something three minutes long and radio-friendly, and entered the album charts at No. 1. The Grammy voters seem to think Metallica is the only metal band in the world.

But with its enormous mainstream success, Metallica has in many ways become a fair semblance of what it was rebelling against to begin with--heavy MTV rotation, fusillades of flashpots, epic-length guitar solos, fleets of tractor-trailers and all--and sometimes it seems as if the band is veering dangerously close to self-parody. On Monday at the Forum, in the first show of a sold-out three-night stand, Metallica tried to reinvent the arena concert ritual and pretty much succeeded.

Instead of an opening act, Metallica screened its own pregame show, a short video documentary of the band that was periodically interspersed with live shots of fans milling around in the lobby and of the band itself getting ready backstage.

Instead of a standard platform, Metallica used a stage that thrust into the audience like the bow of a ship, around which three of the band members positioned themselves at the cardinal points of the compass--wherever you were sitting, a player was always facing you, and the fourth, drummer Lars Ulrich, scooted around on a motorized drum platform, looking a little like a giant snail.

On each side of the hanging scoreboard, a video screen flashed beautifully lit live images of the musicians, directed more like a PBS symphony broadcast than an MTV video. The band was lit largely with translucent, almost incandescent pastels. If you were in the cheap seats, it might have been the most beautiful concert you’ve ever seen.

But while the setup heightened the interaction of Metallica with the audience, it limited the band members’ interaction with each other, and the usual Metallica chemistry often wasn’t there: The sound was muddy, the ensemble imprecise.

Even on such Metallica chestnuts as “Sanitarium,” the audience bellowed the words in unison with singer James Hetfield and bobbed their heads as one, but the music was hardly more than an undifferentiated roar underlaid with Ulrich’s martial beat and topped with lead guitarist Kirk Hammett’s trebly filigree.

Newer songs, such as “Sad But True,” off the current album, were crisper--perhaps because they were written with a prominent bass part in mind, unlike the earlier stuff--and meshed better with Hetfield’s superb three-note growl.

At one point, the band performed a medley of songs from its “. . . And Justice for All” LP, accompanied by a video montage of their tour for that album. It may have been a little like a K-Tel commercial, but it also worked--older, extremely sectional Metallica songs sometimes seemed a little like a medley anyway. All that was missing was scrolling titles on the screen.

The set peaked with the second encore, an extended version of “Seek and Destroy,” the aggressive Metallica classic that launched a rock ‘n’ roll revolution, that was all light, fury and splendid racket.

Metallica also plays the San Diego Sports Arena on Tuesday, and returns to the Forum onFeb. 12.