One man's tour through the world of death metal

She calls to promise that a parcel en route to my apartment is "so brutal" I will be left "crying in the corner," relaying the threat in a sweet singsong voice, like a PR specialist on retainer for a Mexican drug cartel. This is not my first warning. She has also recently confessed her desire to find the perfect product to variously "annihilate," "devastate," and "pummel me into submission." Oh, and by the way, she coos, will you be at Murderfest?

An NSA agent eavesdropping on a metal publicist's phone call to my apartment could be forgiven for assuming I'm part of a murderous doomsday cult down for desecration Happily, this woman with the voice of an angel and the well-oiled vocabulary of a dominatrix is not on a Mexican drug cartel's payroll. Murderfest is not actually a festival of murder. And I have not been receiving padded mailers stuffed with my (nonexistent) wee sweet daughter's mutilated digits. No, she is a publicist for a heavy metal record label; I am a political journalist with a modest reputation as a moonlighting go-to guy for extreme metal features and, like so many faux death threats, pitches and promos from her and many others similarly employed drift into my mailbox daily. Last Christmas, Century Media Records sent me a card depicting a zombie Santa brandishing a butcher knife.

Joy is a little skewed in this world, clearly, and rating true heavy metal records—death to false metal!—inverts the way we rate virtually everything else in life: The less preferable the experience described, the more preferable the record. For example, the promotional materials accompanying Pig Destroyer's Phantom Limb—hands down the single best metal album of the past year—promise a disc to further "the enigmatic band's nihilistic, shock-and-awe attack," boiling the band's elements "down to its muscle, sinew, and bone ... and use them to commit a vicious assault." Exchange the word band with, say, neighbor, and, voilà! Welcome to the worst day of your life: "Well, Mother, honestly I've been better. My enigmatic neighbor just launched a nihilistic shock-and-awe attack on me." Instead ... it's pure auditory bliss.

Such vernacular will doubtless confound many. An NSA agent eavesdropping on a publicist's phone call to my apartment ("So, tonight, Suffocation/Immolation?") could be forgiven for assuming I'm part of a murderous doomsday cult down for desecration when I'm simply off to wade about in a quivering mass of fat, sweaty, pentagram-festooned men. Likewise, my long-suffering wife, a financial attorney whose taste in music runs more toward the Decemberists and Built to Spill than Nasum and Tragedy, finds it difficult to take an interest in my interests, try as she might.

"You must be excited to see Pig Destroyer," she said as I headed off to last year's Summer Slaughter package tour.

"No, it's Cattle Decapitation," I answered, perhaps a bit snippily. Does she ever listen to me? "Different band."

"Wasn't Pig Destroyer playing, too, though?"

"Actually, Cattle Decapitation is playing with ... well, just plain Decapitation and Cephalic Carnage."

"What's 'cephalic' mean?"

"Um, head, I think."

"Head carnage? Okay, have a ... uh, good time?"

Alas, we members in good standing of what Metallica christened on their 1983 album Kill 'Em All as the "Metal Militia" must be bilingual, fluent in both our native language as well as lyrical metallic brutality. "Damage, Inc." is a song, not a place you can actually go get a job, so you can't walk around the office growling, "Steamroller action crushing all/Victim is your name and you shall fall," and expect a promotion. You need to translate it for unmetal Stepford Boss and say something like, "You know, Dave, I think I'm really ready for more responsibility and I'd love to prove myself a leader outside of the copier room." The world, the metal militiaman (like the fundamentalist Christian) must always remember, does not understand us.

And so when operatic black-metal band Septic Flesh boldly claims they "carry the spirit of burning phoenix" on their upcoming release, Communion, and hence are "unstoppable, even by the flames of an infernal sun, as they possess the ophidian will to carry on beyond all obstacles," it means little to my wife. Me? I'm intrigued. Tell the metal militia that "when the armies of the dead return with their pestilence to annihilate the living, there will be no better guides traveling down the fiery road to the endless abyss of Hell than Belphegor" to the soundtrack of the band's latest disc, Bondage Goat Zombie, and it will send us running not for the confessional booth, but to the nearest record store.

Not that one could necessarily divine my interest from outward appearances. When I stopped at a record store in New Hampshire last January while covering the primary election for a conservative monthly—Satanic black metal is literally the only known cure for the fetid taste a Mike Huckabee speech leaves in one's mouth—the clerk glanced at my suit and exclaimed, "Whoa, you don't look like someone who would listen to Rotting Christ!" Of course, with all the metal protruding from his face, he didn't look like someone who would have a job, yet there we both were, fish out of water united on a transcendental plane. A squealing, blast-beat-ridden transcendental plane steeped in rhetorical blood and hellish imagery, sure, but a transcendental plane nonetheless.

It's a small plane, in the scheme of things. Beyond even the violent qualifiers and grisly adjectives, though, I realize that faced with the same blast beats, dark imagery, and disharmonies I find so inspiring, most will see only obscenity and hear only artless, undifferentiated noise. I may think it is clever that Carcass once titled an instrumental "Genital Grinder." That's likely to remain a minority view in the nation at large. I may find more emotional resonance in Pig Destroyer's "Pretty in Casts" ("I only get to hold her when she's injured") and the towering Converge epic Jane Doe than in Lionel Richie's entire oeuvre, but I can't expect that to be widely understood.

Yet, while I may be a skeptic on divine intervention—actual intervention by God in the corporeal world, that is, not the 1994 Slayer album—there is a transcendent quality to music so excessively unyielding. In Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller praised 1930s Paris as a place where "everything is raised to apotheosis." Grindcore. Power-violence. Crustgrind. Noisecore. These subgenres raise music to apotheosis, to its howling, roaring, messy end.

I won't attempt to concoct a defense for Cannibal Corpse songs like "Entrails Ripped From a Virgin's Cunt" or "Fucked With a Knife"—um, ew—or church-burning white nationalist European black-metal musicians or legions of lesser bands and meathead fans. An art form should be judged by its best example, not its worst. Jackson Pollock fans wouldn't abide his work being shellacked as pretentious horseshit simply because most abstract expressionism is pretentious horseshit. Fans of Entombed and Dismember should remain similarly unbending.

At its best, extreme metal is music for those who—to adopt the parlance of Black Flag—would rather rise above than skip along. Clocking in at less than two seconds, the classic Napalm Death Scum track "You Suffer" holds the Guinness World Record for shortest song. We shake our heads. We grin at the novelty. There is, however, an admirable economy of thought there. "You suffer, but why?" Nic Bullen bellows. What else is there to say, really? Not exactly a message destined to gain widespread popularity in our emasculated crybaby society, which is probably why the most fully realized extreme-music communities I've visited have not been in the United States, but in cities like Riga, Latvia, and Caracas, Venezuela, where the realities of life are a little meaner and more immediate.

"We understand why so feeble a culture hates true art," Nietzche wrote in The Birth of Tragedy. "It fears destruction thereby." The feeble can have their pretty, polished strains. I'll take apotheosis and guided tours of hell over that any day.