Live albums by Megadeth, Heaven & Hell deliver

During my heavy-metal appreciation-development years (read junior high and high school), I was drawn to doom-laden guitars of Black Sabbath and speed-metal pioneers Megadeth.

While I have listened to Black Sabbath during Ozzy Osbourne's leaner years in the '70s, I also liked what the band did with new lead singer Ronnie James Dio on the "Heaven & Hell" album, which hit the charts in 1980. That album and its follow-up, "Mob Rules," mixed the trademark doom-and-gloom Sabbath style with the mysticism of Dio's lyrics and vocals.

It was some major empowerment material for an insecure 100-pound nerd.

I remember when that lineup released the live album "Live Evil" in 1983. My mother wanted to buy my sister and me a present for Easter. She gave me a choice between an album or a book. I think I was the only kid on my block whose mother bought him a Black Sabbath album for Easter.

Anyway, in 1983, a new band named Metallica had released an album called "Kill 'em All." It was released a few months after original guitarist/lyricist Dave Mustaine was kicked out because of his aggressive substance abuse.

Mustaine, in turn, created another band, Megadeth, and released a blistering debut album, "Killing Is My Business ... and Business Is Good." I had that original album on vinyl and loved the track "Mechanix," which, as most metalheads know, is the original version of Metallica's "Four Horsemen."

Fast-forward to last week. I opened two packages on my desk, which prompted an air-guitar solo while jumping around the office. Those two packages contained Megadeth's live album "That One Night," and another album called "Live in Radio City Music Hall" by a band called Heaven & Hell, which is, in reality, the Dio-fronted lineup of the early-'80s Black Sabbath.

While I have a love/hate relationship with live albums (although I still love "Live Evil" to this day), I had been looking forward to these two albums. Both double-CD collections, which are also available on DVD, are packed with nostalgic metal anthems and some new and shiny weapons of musical destruction.

Both releases are mixed and mastered in clean, razor-sharp headbanging glory. And both show how the elder statesmen of metal can still crank it out (regardless of what Tenacious D sang about in the satirical tune "Dio").

With Heaven & Hell, the band had to change its name to separate itself from the Osbourne/Sabbath reunion, and the disc only features Dio-era songs, which were recorded at New York's Radio City Music Hall earlier this year.