OTTAWA - "Are you ready for the ceremony to begin?"

It was less a question than a demand from Disturbed lead screamer David Draiman, his muscle-bound arms bulging with clenched fists beckoning to the heavens.

"Are you ready to transform yourselves into beings that are completely indestructible?"

Disturbed lived up to their name, propelling a rocket-fuelled bulldozer through a sweat-and-suds-soaked Scotiabank Place last night.

The band's 90-minute set played out like a depraved sermon from some demon church, with lyrics that read like Old Testament scripture spewed vociferously from the pale-faced and glistening bald pate of Draiman, the deranged high priest on spotlight soap box.

The Chicago-based multi-platinum nu-metal foursome swept into Ottawa, headlining a four-headed monster's ball.

Opening with Voices, from their 2000 breakthrough album The Sickness, Disturbed had the crowd of 4,500 firmly in the clutches of its jagged claw.

Steamrolling through their set, the band offered up a truly ominous deconstruction of the Genesis hit Land of Confusion, and an equally acetylene-scorched rendering of the Tears For Fears classic Shout.

Disturbed's set was the finale of an aural endurance test -- four hours of ear-splitting rock delivered at breakneck pace with scant recovery time between sonic assaults -- that would leave even the most grizzled metal veteran with a buzzsaw drone clanging around their craniums on the drive home.

Vancouver's Art of Dying took the stage first, prepping the still-sparse and meandering crowd with a tightly-packaged seven song set.

Over the course of the evening during the rare moments that could almost pass for hairspray-era power balladry, the crowd ignited the arena in a wash of cigarette lighters --a most welcome return of that near-extinct rock concert tradition of audience participation.

Maybe it's just me, but the inherent threat of searing the flesh off your forefinger while waving an open flame just seems so much more rock n' roll than the techno-savvy Gen-Y alternative of unsheathing cellphones and illuminating the arena in a ghastly blue TV-glow pall.

The show may have also set the gold standard for EPMs (expletives per minute) emanating from The Bank stage.

Second band up Skindred's frontman Benji Webbe unapologetic offering: "Some of you may be thinking, 'What the f--- are you saying, I don't understand a word of that ...' "

Um ... guilty as charged.

From the opening notes, though, Skindred got the mosh pit raging in all its testosterone-and-beer-fueled body slamming glory.

That spirit of brotherly violence continued through the raging adrenaline machine gun staccato attack of Springfield, Mass., grindcore outfit All That Remains, who hooked the crowd with a set highlighted by their hit Two Weeks.

The crowd was an odd mish-mash of the ballcap-clad frat pack and Valley farmboys, leather-and-chains metalheads, mascara-caked goth girls in ripped fishnets, and fire-eyed boys with black muscle shirts barely concealing anabolic-induced mounds of garishly tattooed flesh.

Teenagers mingled with aging rockers from the Golden Age of hair metal.

The median age of the crowd may have been revealed, however, by the oddly-enthusiastic response to All That Remains singer Philip Labonte's query: "How many people have to go to school tomorrow?"