Metal Mania

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He was a closet shredder, the kind of guy who knows Yngwie Malmsteen albums by heart and favors guitar playing flashier than chrome plating.

As such, his tastes were about as fashionable as your grandpa’s sock drawer.

A classically trained guitarist, Brendon Small was attending Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music in the late ’90s when he realized that he was something of an anachronism: an old-school, six-string pyrotechnician in a no-frills nü metal landscape.

"During the time I was going (to Berklee), guitar solos were kind of not even allowed in music anymore," Small recalls. "Right when I started getting good at being able to do the stuff that I liked, it was just desperately uncool to play that kind of stuff. They didn’t want to hear virtuosity, they didn’t want to hear a bunch of notes whizzing by, and I love that sound. I always have."

And so Small put his guitar down for a while and began embarking on a career in comedy writing and as a stand-up comedian while working at a movie theater by day.

"My roommate was going and interning at Conan O’Brien, and I was like, ‘Man, I want that guy’s job,’ " Small recalls. "I knew I was funny, on the inside and stuff."

Eventually, Small, along with cohort Tommy Blacha, would launch a show for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim umbrella that would play more directly into his musical background: the headbanging animated satire "Metalocalypse."

A sardonic, blood-soaked romp that follows the exploits of mythical, world-dominating death metal band Dethklok, the show both winks at heavy metal stereotypes (a preoccupation with violence, low SAT scores, etc.) and embraces them.

The series follows the trials and tribulations of a quintet of uber-famous metal dudes (frontman Nathan Explosion, guitarists Skwisgaar Skwigell and Toki Wartooth, bassist William Murderface and drummer Pickles), who live in a giant mansion named Mordhaus (German for "death house"), travel in a mammoth contraption called the Hatredcopter and whose concerts always seem to result in the sudden deaths of many of their fans.

While sending up certain aspects of the harder-than-thou machismo that’s always saturated heavy metal, the show doesn’t goof on the genre as much as the excessive egoism of stardom.

"Our goal was to make fun of celebrity-ism more than metal," Small says. "There’s more stuff to make fun of in that world, because with metal, what are you going to make fun of? These guys work hard, they bust their asses, they’re better musicians than most popular musicians, and I don’t think that’s funny. Where’s the humor in that?"

Prior to "Metalocalypse," Small developed the animated series "Home Movies," which also aired on the Cartoon Network and was based on Small’s life as an 8-year-old.

After four seasons of that, Small pitched a new venture.

"I called the guy from Adult Swim and said, ‘Here’s the show idea: It’s an extreme metal band, there’s going to be tons of murder, tons of destruction and I’m not interested in having anyone understand anything that anyone’s saying. And I’m serious about that,’ " Small recalls. "And he just laughed really hard and said, ‘OK, green light, go for it.’ "

The show has since become a hit, especially on DVD, with the series’ first season selling more than 100,000 copies.

Popular among metal musicians as well — "Metalocalypse" has featured guest appearances by the members of Metallica, Cannibal Corpse, King Diamond and many others — the show also has spawned an official Dethklok record, "The Dethalbum," where Small plays all the instruments save for drums.

A catchy, convincing exercise in soot-black metal, the disc is full of hard-charging, fist-in-the-air anthems about mechanical reptiles ("Better Metal Snake"), killing for a living ("Briefcase Full of Guts") and the unbearable burden of having to pay taxes ("Dethharmonic"). The end result is an album of crushing, cement-covered riffs and double bass drum workouts that rumble by like stampeding livestock.

And it too has been a big success, debuting at No. 31 on the Billboard albums chart and becoming the top-selling death metal disc of all time after having moved close to 200,000 copies.

Now, Dethklok is on the road for its first headlining tour, with Small and a trio of musicians bringing the songs to life with suitably outsized production values.

"What we do is a big, gigantic preproduced show with comedy sketches in it and stuff like that," Small says. "We’re playing to pictures, so we’re playing to a gigantic screen. We’re lit from behind, we have this really great lighting show that’s going to accompany the video projections, and then we’re playing underneath it, like a pit orchestra would. The way I wanted it to feel was like a big, stupid Disney ride where you’re involved and there’s a plot that kind of unfolds."

But while they’re playing the roles of savage heavy metal Hessians, don’t expect this bunch to dress the part.

Small may give voice to a cartoon, but he doesn’t want to be one.

"We’re not going to embarrass people by putting on stupid wigs," he says. "We’re supposed to sound like Dethklok, we’re not supposed to look like Dethklok."

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