Black Dahlia Murder on bill at Extreme Thing music and sports fest

For a lot of death metal bands, smiling onstage is as taboo as decipherable between-song banter, a professed affection for Disney Channel programming and pastel-colored wardrobes.

And yet, when you see the Black Dahlia Murder live, that's all the dudes seem to be doing, plastered with toothy grins or just plain plastered, period.

"It wouldn't be right to see us going on stage and be like, 'We came through a portal from hell this morning,' " frontman Trevor Strnad says of the lack of menace at one of his band's gigs despite the intensity of their tunes. "You might get some beer on your shirt, but you're gonna live."

Death metal is posited on malevolence, sonically and visually -- it possesses the bile-gurgling sound and grisly look of a public disembowelment.

As such, it's hard to imagine, for instance, the guys in Deicide rocking out in a bowling alley, "Big Lebowski"-style, in one of their videos.

But that's what the Black Dahlia Murder did in their clip for one of their more popular songs, the fan favorite "Necropolis."

In another video, they filmed themselves partying Andrew W.K.-hard in Vegas, complete with vomiting and frightened passers-by.

And they do it all while neither dressing nor acting like Satan's leather-clad little helpers, but rather a bunch of drunken I.T. guys let loose from the computer lab for the weekend.

"It seems that just by looking different, looking like a bunch of nerds or whatever, it's given us some crossover appeal," Strnad chuckles.

This crossover appeal has come to define the Black Dahlia Murder.

They've become one of the biggest bands of their ilk, the bridge between the suffocating technicality of mid-'90s death metal, the more melodic Swedish-based sounds of that era as exemplified by bands such as At the Gates and In Flames and the contemporary scene, which is more rooted in metallic hardcore influences.

They're highly popular among younger death metal fans with their alternately guttural and shrieked vocals and anthemic passages, and yet, they also hold plenty of appeal for older scene lifers who grew up on the swarming, progressive, fired-from-a-cannon riffs of bands such as Cannibal Corpse and Dying Fetus.

Black Dahlia Murder's latest, and finest, disc, "Ritual," their fifth overall, debuted at No. 31 on the Billboard album chart, moving close to 13,000 copies in its first week, a big number for a band like this.

Still, death metal will always be an acquired taste, and Strnad knows as much, because it was for him as well.

Initially cutting his teeth on hardcore punk bands such as Minor Threat and Black Flag along with pioneering thrash acts such as Slayer and Metallica as a kid, he remembers getting his first death metal album when he was 13 years old, Suffocation's "Pierced from Within."

"It just scared the crap out of me, man, to tell the truth," Strnad recalls.

For him, a growing appreciation for death metal was a corollary of his adolescent love of horror flicks.

"I had that friend whose dad would let you watch whatever movies you wanted, so we used to watch the first 'Halloween,' all the old slashers, just over and over," recalls Strand, a Michigan native. "Metal was kind of like a backdrop for more skeletons, pretty much.

"It's like people who go to a haunted house who want to be scared," Strnad says, elaborating on death metal's appeal. "It's that same thing, especially at first, before you get jaded to all the blood and guts."

And everybody likes a good cinematic scare, right?

Well, death metal is a harder sell, though Black Dahlia Murder seem to enjoy exposing the music to different crowds, often playing with bands outside the scene.

To wit, this Saturday, they'll be performing as part of Extreme Thing, the annual all-ages sports and music fest where they will certainly be the heaviest band on the bill alongside such acts as the Used, Falling in Reverse, Underoath and many more (see full lineup at extremething.com).

"We'll play at a mixed festival that has all kinds of music, and for the most part, you've got to accept that most people are going to hate it," Strand says.

Hearty laugh.

"We have no problems with being the sore thumb," he adds. "It's fun to be the fastest, scariest band."

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.