EDMONTON - It's no surprise that Megadeth's Dave Mustaine turned into a born-again Christian a few years ago.

He's been singing about the apocalypse since 1983. The born-agains seem eager for the world to end so Jesus will come -- so it all works out!

In fact, religion seems to add an extra air of authenticity to Mustaine's blithe pronouncements of doom, a dash of authority to his entertainingly grim worldview.

I'm dying to see these guys do a heavy metal version of Jesus Christ Superstar. Swear to God, one of the tunes they played at Rexall Place last night sounded like "the 39 lashes." Move over, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Well, whatever. A metal show is a swell place to blow the cobwebs out of your brain -- and last night's "Canadian Carnage" presentation with the ol' school heroes Megadeth and Slayer did the trick just fine.

Nice turnout, too, more than 7,000 fans clad in black T-shirts advertising a variety of metal bands whose names are written in frighteningly unreadable fonts.

It was a mostly male crowd, of course, with lots of kids cutting loose on the last day of school, happily obliterating what they'd learned all year. Some fun.

Megadeth may play here a bit too much, but the band has the metal showmen thing down pat -- nice 'n' speedy riffs, impressive double lead guitar, shaggy manes banging to the music. It was a solid set.

Mustaine and his boys drew material from a variety of apocalyptic-themed albums of the past, including the closest thing Megadeth has to a "hit," Symphony of Destruction: "You take a mortal man and put him in control, watch him become a God, watch people's heads a-roll."

You can see Dave's been pondering this Christianity thing for a long time, possibly before even he knew it himself.

New material last night: Headcrusher. Let's hear it for artistic growth.

Closing the night with bang, Slayer is cut from the same basic cloth as Megadeth, having been gleefully thrashing for about as long, hailing from the same great state of California and dwelling darkly on much the same subject matter.

The band pounded out songs from albums like Hell Awaits, Seasons in the Abyss and God Hates Us All -- wonder what Dave makes of that one -- plus new stuff from the upcoming World Painted Blood.

To the uninitiated, this stuff might all sound the same --ultra-fast, super-heavy, ferocious guitar noodling, maniacal rhythms and incoherent angry shouting on top for an all-around deafening sonic assault on the senses.

Every heavy metal story must contain the phrase "sonic assault on the senses."

Say what you will about thrash metal, that it's just noise, that it will never catch on among polite company.

But this stuff is pure. It hasn't been affected by things like time, trends, record sales. Hooks have not yet infected the genre to a great extent -- at least not enough to earn anyone a No. 1 hit.

The real metal dudes are more concerned with riffs than melody. And the good ones are as much virtuosos as any jazz musician -- just, you know, a bit louder.

The only thrash metal band you could accuse of being a sell-out is Metallica -- and you think they care?

The live true metal experience, as the one last night, is a cathartic male-bonding ritual, from the shared fists-in-air chants to the raging "circle pits" that look like a rotating soccer riot and almost always spin counter-clockwise.

A metal show is one of the few places where the word "motherf---er" is a term of endearment, where an elbow to the kidneys is the price you pay for bonding with like-minded fans in the mosh pit.

These tough-talking, rough-looking, hard-playing metal musicians may be singing about death and doom and destruction, but they're doing it out of pure love.

Jesus would be proud -- if He ever gets here again.