You might not have known it from looking at the audience, but when the Chicago instrumental band Pelican performed at the Knitting Factory in New York in late July, it was playing metal.
Instead of long hair and all-black outfits, the crowd was displaying the trappings of brainy, slightly nerdy indie rock. Young men wore artistically cropped hair and tight-legged jeans, and there was even a smattering of young women in librarian glasses and worn-out Chuck Taylor sneakers.
This is not your older brother's metal crowd. "I've been wearing my Def Leppard T-shirt on tour recently," said Laurent Lebec, a guitarist in Pelican and a fan of that archetypal 1980s metal band.
"People come up to me and ask, 'Is that a joke?' I have to tell them that I don't wear T-shirts as a joke."
The particularly dark and aggressive strain of rock called heavy metal has been around for more than three decades. In that time, it has spawned a range of offshoots, but none have been as unlikely as the recent wave of bands using metal as a jumping-off point for a range of experimental styles, dabbling in free jazz, minimalist post-rock, noise and even modern classical music.
This is art-metal, a curious scene populated by a new generation of metal acolytes onstage and younger fans often unfamiliar with metal's headbanger heritage.
"Metal in general has long been unjustly maligned as solely the province of knuckle-dragging meatheads," said Aaron Turner, a founder of the influential Hydra Head Records, which has released three CDs by Pelican, including, recently, "The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw." "That said, there's never been a group of musicians like there is now, who are helping to advance the form."
Heavy metal reached a commercial apex with the hair-metal bands of the '80s, but those spandex-and-lipstick aficionados were often maligned within the greater heavy metal scene. Metal, many argued, should be punishing and morbid, not garish. So while the flashy acts caught on in the pop arena, the metal mainstream focused on technique and form, honing a high degree of technical complexity. By the outset of the '90s, eccentrics like the Melvins and the Flying Luttenbachers were acting on the belief that heavy music was compatible with an avant-garde sensibility. Their peers didn't all agree.
"For years, I felt we didn't have any common ground with anyone - I felt like I was on the inside of it, but not always a welcome visitor," said Justin Broadrick, a member of the pioneering experimental metal bands Napalm Death and Godflesh, who this year released an album with his new band, Jesu, on Hydra Head.
A decade later, those early acts have given rise to others. "Those bands laid the groundwork for us," said Turner, who also plays in the highly digressive post-metal band Isis. "We're part of a recognizable lineage."
It has produced a scene as noteworthy for its traditional aggression, power and growling guitars as for its appetite for experimentation.
Orthrelm, described by its founder, Mick Barr, as making classically influenced jazz-metal fusion, has just released "OV" (Ipecac), a one-song, 45-minute trancelike tour through seismic noise, North African music and guitar riffs that suggest a needle skipping on an early speed-metal record. Four years ago, the band released the fascinating "Asristir Veildrioxe" (Troubleman Unlimited), which was hypnotic in almost the opposite fashion: 99 tracks lasting a collective 12 minutes. These weren't songs, but rather brainy guitar-and-drum outbursts, each one incrementally different from the others.
Just as influenced by metal, but in wholly different fashion, is Sunn 0))), which borrowed its odd-looking name from the logo of a well-regarded amplifier company. "We take the atmosphere of metal - the barbarism, the unrelentingness - and we apply it to getting the room actually vibrating," said Stephen O'Malley, who also plays with the scabrous and pensive band Khanate. Accordingly, the band's songs are vast seas of gurgle and drone.
On records, Sunn 0))) haunts. In concert, its members, who perform in druid-style robes and typically use industrial smoke machines, alter the feel of the room.
"In that way, the entire space becomes the performance," O'Malley said.
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