Heavy Metal

Nothing succeeds like excess: According to Billboard, the best-selling album in the United States this week is Def Leppard's Hysteria, which has sold more than four million copies. Including Hysteria, four of this week's Top 10 albums fall into the category of "heavy metal," that musical style prone to sensory-overload stage shows, rebellious lyrics and thunderous guitars spewing twisted and fitful solo lines. Bands such as Poison and Guns 'N' Roses, two of the current crop that have mastered the tricks of the '70s bands Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, are actually experiencing hit singles.

Twisted Sister, performing tomorrow night at the Spectrum, is best known to the non-heavy-metal audience as one of the prime targets of the Parents Music Resource Center's anti-rock campaign. The band's lead singer, Dee Snider, was one of three pop stars (Frank Zappa and John Denver were the others) who testified before a Sept. 19 Senate hearing in defense of rock music. There, Snider was calm and articulate; in concert, he provides the sort of addled froth and naughtiness that his fans seem to find peerlessly witty.

Ozzfest was more than just a chance for Ozzy Osbourne to connect with young fans and reunite with his old buddies in Black Sabbath. The all-day, multi-band metal-palooza at Camden's Waterfront Entertainment Centre on Sunday was an opportunity to redefine heavy metal in 1997, after the genre was co-opted and left in the dust by grunge and industrial. Don't even think about confusing this batch of metalheads with '80s pop tarts such as Poison and Warrant. Machine Head, Vision of Disorder, Downset, Fear Factory and Pantera make like the '80s hair, and, unfortunately, the catchy hooks, never happened.

Rock-and-roll bad boys have always been big. First there was Elvis, exciting teenage girls in not so new but unquestionably nasty ways. Then the Rolling Stones pluralized the concept and provided generations of hard-rock bands with a primary role model. Guns 'N' Roses are today's baddest bad boys. The Stones did an album called Tattoo You, but these young Guns are covered with the genuine articles. They're also as hot as an Uzi, with two albums in the Billboard Top 5, representing sales of around eight million albums in the last 18 months.

Burlington Township saved $81,200 in landfill costs in 1985 through its five-part recycling program, according to a report issued this week by the township. The majority of the savings resulted by removing leaves, wood chips, newspapers and other materials from the waste sent to landfills. The savings were calculated on an estimated landfill dumping charge of $12 a cubic yard. The township estimates that it saved $48,000 on leaves, $14,400 on wood chips, $10,800 on newspapers, $2,400 on heavy metal and $5,600 on tires.

The only unfortunate thing about the commercial disaster of the recent Stephen King-directed horror film Maximum Overdrive is that so few people heard the sound-track music, written and performed by AC/DC, which also played to a sold-out audience at the Spectrum last night. The sound track contains what is perhaps the ultimate AC/DC composition, "Who Made Who," in which the boys tackle the subject of evolution - who made who, indeed - and midway through the song pretty much confess that they haven't the foggiest idea what they're talking about.

Apart from a few brief wah-wah interludes, the guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela's show at the Keswick Theater Wednesday night would have sounded identical had the power cut out mid-song. But over the course of a 90-minute set, Rodrigo S?nchez and Gabriela Quintero proved that it's possible to play heavy metal with no more than two acoustic guitars and four exceptionally deft hands. Although they're originally from Mexico, S?nchez and Quintero first broke through in Dublin, Ireland, largely on the strength of their live show.

The buzz outside the Spectrum after Sunday night's concert wasn't caused by earsplitting decibels alone. The gab on the stadium steps, the talk on the subway, testified to one thing: Heavy metal has a new crown prince. His name is Dave Mustaine. His band is Megadeth. Though headliner Judas Priest looked impressive with a quarter-million- dollar light show and an elaborate stage set, Megadeth wowed the Spectrum's rabid headbangers with superior firepower. Sunday night's show was an exhibition that pitted Priest's old-fashioned heavy-metal thunder against 'Deth's new heavy-metal lightning.

In the two weeks since a slightly built teenager with a penchant for heavy- metal music stabbed his mother to death and then took his Boy Scout knife to his own throat, this town has been possessed by the fear of Satan. The two grisly deaths, combined with a detailed outline of the murder that the 14-year-old left behind, his drawings of satanic images and an invitation to schoolmates to form an evil cult, have led even the most skeptical to seek an explanation in the supernatural.

Movie sound-track albums are usually useless collections of hit singles in search of a context, but the one for the upcoming Robin Williams comedy Club Paradise (Columbia ) holds your interest with oddities. The most noticeable one is a duet between the film's co-star, Jamaican reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, and English rocker Elvis Costello. Their "Seven- Day Weekend" is clumsy and affable - their voices never mesh, and the melody isn't memorable, but it's a charming effort.

BOBBY LIEBLING was a trainwreck. The frontman of beyond-cult metal band Pentagram admitted at the beginning of the documentary "Last Days Here" that he has been a drug addict for some four decades. At 54, he was living at his parents' house in Germantown, Md., and had delusions that parasites were are eating away his hands. But to some, Bobby Liebling is a god. "Last Days Here," directed by Philly filmmakers Don Argott and Demian Fenton ("Rock School," "The Art of the Steal")

Five movies in six years is no small feat. Five movies in six years when you're based in Philadelphia and dealing with the hard realities of indie filmmaking - money, time, distribution, marketing - is no small feat, either. And here Don Argott, Demian Fenton, and Sheena Joyce are happy to say they've had "a little bit of success. " They are the collaborative team behind Last Days Here, a wonderfully strange and affecting portrait of a heavy metal demigod's fall into the abyss, which opens Friday.

Electric, cocky, boisterous, kinetic, sometimes smart, sometimes dumb, and accelerating with hugely impressive speed - that's the big picture of Rock of Ages , the Broadway jukebox musical that reclaims the heavy-metal '80s. The show's national tour, here at the Merriam Theater through the weekend, is better than on Broadway because of its killer cast, which strikes me as even more polished. That's not to say the Broadway version slumps by comparison - it's been playing for two years, is just short of 1,000 performances, and is also more magnetic as it rolls along.

No offense to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, the scrappy indie-rock band fronted by Philadelphian Alec Ounsworth, but the headlining act was not the main story at Union Transfer on Wednesday night. The venue was. The new rock club in the old Spaghetti Warehouse building at 10th and Spring Garden Streets, which once was a railroad storage depot, made its Philadelphia music scene debut, and it didn't disappoint. The former meatball palace has retained its egg-shaped chandeliers and vaulted ceiling, and added a sparkling state-of-the-art sound system that came across clear and full from every nook and cranny of the room.

SINGER-ACTRESS Zooey Deschanel will combine her two occupations this fall on Fox, having written and recorded the theme song to the show she will star in, "New Girl. " Deschanel, known for music-centric films such as "(500) Days of Summer" and "Almost Famous" and who is one half of She & Him, plays a newly single woman who moves in with three guys eager to meet her friends. An overly emotional sort, Deschanel's character sings whenever she is overwhelmed. "It's just a part of how she expresses herself," Deschanel told the Television Critics' Association Friday in Los Angeles during Fox's panel on the new show.

'Are you ready for the sound of war?" screamed the singer at Johnny Brenda's Thursday night. It was the kind of boastful introduction that might preface a song by almost any heavy-metal band. But Faisal Mustafa, the lead singer of Acrassicauda, wasn't speaking metaphorically. Rather than channeling rage at social conventions or authority figures, the band's music has its origins in its native Iraq. Although its members are now resettled Stateside, Acrassicauda was formed in a Baghdad basement during the last years of the Saddam Hussein regime.

McDonald's customers who bought Shrek -themed glasses at the restaurant chain can return them starting Wednesday for $3 a glass, the company said. McDonald's announced the recall Friday of 12 million souvenir glasses because the glasses were decorated with materials that contain cadmium, a heavy metal that poses health risks. McDonald's said that the Consumer Product Safety Commission says "the glassware is not toxic" and that the recall is being conducted "out of an abundance of caution.

Ronnie James Dio, 67, a singer with the heavy-metal bands Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio, whose powerful vocal style and attachment to demonic imagery made him a genre mainstay, died Sunday of stomach cancer in Los Angeles. Mr. Dio was known as much for his vocal prowess as for his stage persona. He sang about devils, defiance, and the glory of rock-and-roll with a voice that rose to a bombastic vibrato. He is credited with popularizing the "devil horn" hand gesture - index and pinkie fingers up, everything else clenched in a fist - as a symbol of metal's occultlike worship of everything scary and heavy.

Apart from a few brief wah-wah interludes, the guitar duo Rodrigo y Gabriela's show at the Keswick Theater Wednesday night would have sounded identical had the power cut out mid-song. But over the course of a 90-minute set, Rodrigo S?nchez and Gabriela Quintero proved that it's possible to play heavy metal with no more than two acoustic guitars and four exceptionally deft hands. Although they're originally from Mexico, S?nchez and Quintero first broke through in Dublin, Ireland, largely on the strength of their live show.

Why is Anvil, the storied Canadian heavy-metal band that's been in business for three decades, playing an almost empty dungeonlike club in Prague, when a band of its stature should be packing venues that hold a thousand people or more? That question is asked in Sacha Gervasi's superb rockumentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil, by a British lawyer who's an avid Anvil fan. And drummer Robb Reiner does his best to answer succinctly. "I can answer that in one word," he says. "Er, two words.