Celebrating the mettle of metal

Albert Mudrian sounds like a recent graduate of anger-management class. He speaks in a measured voice, the gentle, even nature of his tone offsetting the coarseness of his words.

"I definitely spent my youth being mad at everyone," he says.

But the 34-year-old Philadelphian is not a recovering rageoholic. He's just a grown-up fan of heavy-metal music.

"To the untrained ear it's just kind of a lot of screaming and lots of fast playing," he explains. "But if you are kind of an angrier person in general, then all the noise and the aggression of this style of music just kind of connect with people."

Mudrian's latest book, Precious Metal: Decibel Presents the Stories Behind 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces (Da Capo Press, $18.95), offers a behind-the-scenes look into the making of some landmark albums. The book is a compilation of band interviews from the "Hall of Fame" column in Decibel, the extreme-music magazine of which Mudrian is editor-in-chief.

Speaking by phone from Virginia, where he was visiting his girlfriend, Mudrian maintained that while his anger-filled youth was well behind him, his passion for metal never waned.

"Once you get bitten by the metal bug it's got you for life," he says. "That adrenaline rush is still there when you listen to something that is super-fast and super-aggressive. This music provides a bit of that release, that escape from things."

A native of Wilkes-Barre, where he would later attend King's College, Mudrian fell in love with metal early on.

"I was a bit younger when I first started getting into metal," he says. "It wasn't really until I got to high school that I fell into the trap of death metal and black metal and grindcore - which is a great way to make friends in high school, by the way."

As he became older and more acquainted with the music industry, Mudrian noticed a dearth of publications devoted to his interests. So, in 2004 he started Decibel with the aim of covering the music he loved with the depth he felt it deserved. Today, the monthly magazine, with just a few staffers, claims 4,200 subscribers and a circulation of 50,000.

Mudrian, who still sells all of the magazine's ads, says that one of the original goals of Decibel was to put a more professional face on the scene while giving fans a sense of the music's history.

"Hall of Fame," he says, is the magazine's most popular section and the most challenging to produce. For each installment, all of the contributors to an album must be interviewed at length, a task which can be met by obstacles ranging from deep-seated animosity between former bandmates to lasting tension between original members and their replacements. (The "Hall of Fame" on the album Jane Doe, by the band Converge, was shelved for roughly a year when the group, now a four-piece, was unable to persuade its onetime fifth member to participate in the interview process.)

"These are stories that aren't generally told," Mudrian says. "I know that VH1 has obviously contributed to telling the stories of Black Sabbath or Pantera or Metallica. But pretty much all of the records we're talking about are classics of an underground genre."

Precious Metal maintains the appeal of the original "Hall of Fame" column, uncovering history while dispelling some of the mysticism surrounding metal music's pioneers. Like Mudrian himself, many of the band members interviewed seem at odds with the harsh and violent lyrics of their songs. The interview with Emperor, a black-metal band notorious for its members' arrests on charges of murder and arson, describes Mayhem session bassist Varg Viernes visiting the studio in chain mail and Norwegian armor - all the while serenely eating an ice cream cone.

"Growing up listening to their music, you weren't imagining ice cream being something they could ever eat in full black-metal regalia," says Mudrian. In the case of Cannibal Corpse - whose song "Orgasm Through Torture" features the chorus: "Shackled and bound, unaware my fate / destined to be maimed to stimulate" - Mudrian says, "Their lyrics are utterly vile and violent and misogynistic. But when you talk to them they're just nice, gregarious dudes."

The book also includes a previously unpublished "Hall of Fame" on Darkthrone's album Transilvanian Hunger.

"They would make these weird, really cold-sounding, underproduced, and just creepy-sounding records," says Mudrian. "Their drummer 'Fenriz' worked, and still works, for the post office in Norway during the day. So again it's this dispelling of the mysteriousness of these weird dudes that are living in the woods writing this evil music by candlelight."

"This is a guy [Fenriz] who now e-mails me and sends me funny links," he continues, laughing. "You could never have imagined that they were just sane, rational people."

Precious Metal's look at the history of extreme music comes at an opportune moment. According to Mudrian, metal music's earlier sounds are now having somewhat of a renaissance.

"What we're having is this movement where people are getting back to basics," he says. "You've got these bands that are making music that sounds like it was recorded 18 years ago. As things are getting more extreme and bands are getting more technical and over the top, a lot of people in those scenes are reacting and getting back to an old-school, meat-and-potatoes vibe."

The irony of a back-to-basics trend within a genre built on shock value and extremes is not lost on Mudrian. He urges strangers to the extreme-music scene to see through metal's gore and aggression to find the humor.

"Metal was, for an incredibly long time, not self-aware and not able to poke fun at itself," he says. "And let's be honest: Some of this is really, really funny stuff."