Metal Heads Unite! And thanks to this map, it makes bridging the gap that much easier. Tread the lands of Death, Black, and every other kind of metal you can name.

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Disfiguring the Goddess is a guttural death metal band designed to alienate women, parents and normies. These guys take the pummeling, cookie monster shtick to a cartoonish almost surreal level. God bless them for it.

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Sometimes I’m impressed by how, after all these years, I still love metal. Specifically, filthy, harsh, wrathful metal. I can count on it to scrub my brain clean like steel wool. Check this track out by now-defunct Aussie death metal band Bestial Warlust. Tell me you don’t feel rejuvenated after listening to it!

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Death metal growling takes a lot more practice and skill than people realize. Take Olle Ekman, vocalist for Swedish death metal band Volturyon: he warms up with death metal scales before rehearsal.

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The first time I heard Hate Eternal I thought this is what Christian music should sound like. They’re definitely not Christians, but I remembered that in the Bible, God had to speak to people through chosen prophets such as Moses because His direct voice would destroy mere mortals.

The Erik Rutan-fronted Floridian death metal trio created the most pummeling and unrelenting music I had heard until that point, and I remember basically going almost numb from the intensity. I’m really looking forward to their new album, Phoenix Amongst the Ashes, set to drop on May 10.

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I had to put up with some seriously obnoxious jocks and drunken highschool kids at a recent show featuring flavor-of-the-moment acts that did the whole ecstatic, 80s electro thing that’s so popular these days. Lots of fluorescent colors. I had to blast some death freaking metal when I got home, and Hooded Menace fit the bill perfectly with their doom-leaning, aural assault. Nothing pisses me off more than tepid, uninspired music, and nothing makes me feel more alive than real, gut-wrenching, skull-pounding, giddily sinister heavy metal.
[audio:http://www.profoundlorerecords.com/mp3/HM_Creatures.mp3]

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Anthony Vincent has been roaming the country for the past few years under the name Xrin Arms (pronounced ‘Yer-In Arms’), sand-blasting hearts and minds with his onslaught of digital grindcore psychosis. Processing soul, funk, R&B, pop, death metal, swing, random samples, and every iteration of everything awful through his laptop and pedals, Vincent is the vessel through which a helium-voiced, pharmaceutical-addled, pop-overloaded demon projectile vomits into the open sewer of culture 2.0.
[audio:http://badtaste4life.com/mp3/the_BASSMENT-090707/7%20-%20xrin%20arms%20-%20the%20BASSMENT%20-%20090707.mp3]

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Crust bands have always taken from and given to other subgenres of extreme music — after all, Discharge was largely responsible for inspiring the grindcore bands that begat death metal. Until now though, most bands with a crusty feel to them never really appealed to me because they often were still too rooted in hardcore for my tastes. Thou from Baton Rouge, however, are the first crust band to offer epic, evocative riffs, carefully considered arrangements, and ear-shredding vocals that sound more demonic than merely angry. Drawing from black metal, doom, and heavy psych, the five-piece make a unique and crushing sound very much inspired by the swampy, sweaty, tragedy-stricken part of the world they come from while being very light-handed with their politics.
[audio:http://noladiy.org/mp3/thou/Tyrant/02%20I%20Was%20Ignored.%20%20And%20Judged.%20%20And%20Cast%20Down.mp3]

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San Diego death metal band Cattle Decapitation are a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. Their schtick is pretty silly — they are anti-human vegetarians who pound out grinding, churning, vomitous songs about mankind getting its comeuppance (I can’t help but chuckle at song titles like Bukkake Tsunami). While fans of ultra-technical metal may look down their noses at these guys, the couple times I’ve seen them, they’ve been loads of fun, with frontman Travis Ryan convulsing and spitting like an epileptic in Times Square. Their latest album, The Harvest Floor, is their heaviest and most technically proficient yet, and while they may still be too silly for the metal elite, anyone who wants a good, entertaining slab of brutality should check them out.

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Meshuggah are a much better band recorded than live, at least based on the only time I saw them a couple years ago when they were touring in support of Catch 33. But it’s hard to deny that their albums kick a lot of ass. Their latest video for the song Bleed off last year’s obZen is pretty intense, too.

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Strip away the cookie monster vocals and downtuned, distorted guitars, it’s hard to imagine death metal still reading as death metal, but 8-bit duo Dr. Zilog manage to do just that. The Floridian sound-card tweakers make some pretty amazing original, NES tunes that are strangely compelling, catchy, and actually quite metal.

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Like any fan of a genre, I can’t stand bands that water down the basic elements of said genre in order to make it more accessible to the masses. I used to consider Gojira one of these bands, but it may be because I couldn’t get past their lame album covers. To be honest, they’re still a little too influenced by hardcore on their new album, but I have to admit, the debut video from The Way of All Flesh is brutal as hell. As a matter of fact, the tracks that the French four-piece is streaming on its MySpace page are pretty freaking incredible — unapologetically death metal, but with a few left-field elements, and again, some hardcore-isms with the vocals I could do without. I have to stop being so prejudiced.

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Diablo Swing Orchestra are a Swedish band straight out of a Tom Waits nightmare. They sound exactly like their name suggests, making dirty, raucous swing, updated with some punky power chords, but the operatic Swedish vocals and nearly death-metal growls separate the band from the swing revivalists of the late ’90s. Definitely not the kind of band one would expect coming out of a Scandinavian country. But hell, there’s no rule that says creepers and fuzzy dice don’t go well with Viking helmets.

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A couple weeks ago, some buddies of mine in the black metal band Krallice played a show organized by Matthew Barney (a notorious metalhead) at the Deitch space in Long Island City. Whole pigs were roasted, and the head of one became a stage prop for the Texas band Dagon. The highlight of the evening was the mighty Inquisition, a fantastic Seattle-based black metal duo from Colombia. I’ve never heard live black metal sound this good (who knew a huge art warehouse would be so perfect for blast beats and tremolo picking?), and the crowd — a strange mix of leather-clad biker-looking types, South American metal kids, and tote-bag-sporting hipsters — went nuts. Barney himself meandered through the crowd, looking like a dad that has allowed his kids to drink beer in the basement, and though Bjork was nowhere to be seen, my companion, who has more than a passing resemblance to the Icelandic pixie, received many a double take. Check out Jae Saam’s photostream for some more photos of the evening.

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Anyone who thinks black metal is too rigid and narrow a genre to have room for innovation would do well to check out Lifelover, a Swedish band that defies every convention of black metal while still remaining miraculously kvlt. The sextet wafts between languid, hallucinatory grooves that channel Iggy Pop and latter-day Cure to unhinged freak-outs that sound as if they’re emanating from the deepest, coldest forests of Norway.

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Ten Masked Men are a British parody band that does death metal covers of famous pop songs by Ricky Martin, Christina Aguilera, Madonna, and many others. One of my favorites is their cover of Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’. It’s epic.

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The nice thing about black metal is that it’s so hard for it to be co-opted. Between its often extreme ideologies and its inherently abrasive sound, it’s hard to imagine anyone trying to sell you a pair of sneakers with it. Even as some bands like Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth have wormed their way into the mainstream, the vast majority of black metal fans and bands out there are happy to stay in the filthy pits of the underground. A prime example of such a band is Singapore’s Istidraj. These guys prove that prohibiting chewing gum and banning Beatles songs really don’t make people more passive and well-behaved. These guys make metal so freaking harsh, it’ll make even the most hardened hescher’s knees buckle. This is what punk was supposed to be about.

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Monarch are an incredibly grim, lumbering doom metal band from Basque country in France. Frontwoman Emilie Bresson is one of those rare female singers in metal that’s at once fierce and raspy, yet identifiably female, creating a haunting, menacing sound that can stand up against the most ragingly macho bands out there.

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