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.