POP MUSIC REVIEW : Metallica Has Fun With Blasts From the Past : These merchants of menace haven’t become cheery airheads. But with no new album, the band is out just to give fans a bit of nostalgia.

Ah, those oldies but goodies.

The Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion was filled with the music of memories on Sunday, sounds of simpler times.

But it wasn’t “Fun, Fun, Fun” that 25,000 people were singing with the band. It was “Die, die, die.”

This was a Metallica concert, after all.

Still, the show was about fun, relatively speaking. Singer James Hetfield even used the term fun about 870 times in his personable, between-song comments.

Don’t worry, these merchants of menace haven’t sold out their values and turned into cheerful airheads or anything. This is still the same band that injected meaning and purpose into the vapid heavy-metal world in the late ‘80s, to some extent paving the way for the grunge and alternative explosion with its aggressive, thoughtful, no-bull approach.

But with no new album to promote--the band’s last studio album was 1991’s “Metallica”--and having already toured twice in the last three years, Metallica is on the road again for the pleasure of it--and for its fans. With nothing new to offer song-wise, it’s giving the fans something old.

Building much of the two-hour-plus show on songs dating from before the band was a Top 10 fixture, Metallica was able to give many of these fans things they’d never heard in concert before. The most familiar numbers, “One” and “Enter Sandman,” were saved for encores.

The result was a dynamic tour de force--the old songs haven’t lost any power or relevance in the passing years, and the band’s increased professionalism hasn’t taken off any of the edge.

Missing, though, was any hint of the future. Hetfield teasingly introduced one song as a new one, but it turned out to be the decade-old “Seek & Destroy,” sung this night by bassist Jason Newsted.

A lesser band probably couldn’t get away with this kind of nostalgia, but for Metallica, the good old days made for a great show.

There was also plenty of talk about the old days from Mike Muir, leader of second-billed Suicidal Tendencies. And it’s no wonder.

This show was just two days before the tour moves to Los Angeles for the band’s first concert in its hometown in more than eight years, with promoters and police concerned about past violence at S.T. shows.

The always pumped-up Muir was practically bursting, hyperkinetically bouncing around the stage to the band’s pioneering metal-rap, which still ranks above that of its numerous imitators.

Even more significant than the music, though, was Muir’s power-of-positive-thinking pep talks between songs. Crouched on the stage, rocking back and forth, Muir preached to the crowd about being true to yourself and being the best that you can be, crowning it with an anti-drug message.

“What you’ve got here is the Church of Suicidal,” Muir crowed. He later stated, “Most people want to be liked. I’d rather be right than liked.”

This night, with the crowd raucously embracing the band, he was both.

There was also an anti-drug message from third-billed Candlebox, the lone new-kids act on a bill that also featured Fight, the band led by former Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford (the group replaced Alice in Chains, which dropped off the tour for what were officially termed “health reasons”).

But that clean-living lyric was about the only noteworthy element in Candlebox’s otherwise characterless set of bubblegrunge. Where Metallica and Suicidal explore the nature of life and mind, this Seattle quartet seems stuck in anguishing over getting stood up on a date. Better leave it to the old folks.

* Metallica, Suicidal Tendencies, Candlebox and Fight play tonight at the Cal State Dominguez Hills Velodrome Field, and Sunday on the grounds of Brown Field airport in Otay Mesa near San Diego. Both shows start at 5 p.m., with tickets $24.50.