ALLENTOWN, Pa., Nov. 7 — On Tuesday night, in a plush tour bus parked
in this city's scruffy downtown, a couple of Norwegians were talking
about world music. They were talking about the competing musical
traditions of Norway and Sweden. They were talking about Icelandic
linguistics and Viking mythology. They were talking about indigenous
scenes in Canada, India and lots of places in between. In other
words, they were talking about heavy metal.

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Audio from Enslaved (from myspace.com)


Michael Schmelling for The New York Times
Grutle Kjellson, right, and Ivar Bjornson of Enslaved.
The Norwegians were Ivar Bjornson and Grutle Kjellson, who founded
their metal band, Enslaved, 16 years ago. They were once identified
with the spooky — and, for a time, hugely controversial — subgenre
known as black metal, but they have sloughed off one label after
another while slowly building a worldwide following.

Not a huge one: They are rock stars, more or less, in Norway, but
they are decidedly underground figures in most of the rest of the
world. Still, that a hundred or so fans came out to see them at the
Crocodile Rock Café, a cavernous Allentown club, says something about
the tenacity of the genre and the band. The members hurtled through a
typically eerie, riveting set, propelled by tricky rhythms, keyboard
atmospherics, mutating guitar riffs and careful but cathartic
explosions of noise and screaming.

This was the fourth date of a grueling five-week tour, and the
unglamorous surroundings only underscored the mixed blessing of being
in a band like this one. Being a working metal band often means
touring the world indefinitely.

On a chilly night at the Crocodile Rock, that might not have seemed
like good news to the band members. But it should be good news to
adventurous listeners around the country, including those in New
York: Thursday night the band is scheduled to play the B. B. King
Blues Club & Grill. And you don't have to be an expert in
Scandinavian history — or even a metal fan, really — to enjoy getting
lost in the group's epic, elegant music.

Enslaved went from being called "black metal" to being called "Viking
metal" to being called "progressive metal," though the members prefer
the catch-all term "extreme metal." And in an Internet age
especially, extreme metal both transcends national boundaries and, in
a fertile way, emphasizes them. "Evil" imagery exists everywhere,
inspiring scenes all over the globe. And as old-fashioned Satanic
imagery has given way to subtler allusions to pre-Christian culture,
obsessive fans have gotten used to doing online homework to keep up
with the lyric sheets. If you like Enslaved, for example, you
probably know that Mr. Kjellson used to sing in Icelandic because of
that language's similarity to Old Norse, and you may even know
something about ancient runes.

Now Mr. Kjellson mainly sings in English, partly in an attempt to
close the language gap with non-Norwegian fans, many of whom had been
following the band's evolving interests by reading the English
translations included in some albums. Mr. Bjornson said the
foreignness of English was a benefit too: "That dissonance helps,
getting into character, removing ourselves from our daily lives."

On the most recent Enslaved album — a great CD from 2006
called "Ruun" (Candlelight USA) — the English-language lyrics are
more suggestive than bombastic. Hints of the old black-metal
misanthropy remain ("I do not pity life/I follow not pathetic
order"), but the mood is more melancholy than pugnacious. The title
track, one of the highlights of Tuesday's show, is a crashing paean
to the old gods, building from a prog-rock introduction to a seething
climax: "Reach for them, see them turn away."

From listening to the latest CD, you might never guess that Enslaved
was once associated with one of the most reviled music scenes of all
time. In the early 1990s Norwegian black metal made headlines with a
series of high-profile events: one musician's suicide, a spate of
church burnings and the conviction of two prominent figures — Faust
of Emperor and Varg Vikernes of Burzum — for murder.

One of Enslaved's first releases was a split album with Emperor, and
Mr. Bjornson admits that the media storm helped draw attention to
Norwegian black metal. "People still regard Norway with a certain
respect," he said. "Not only because of all the scary stuff that
happened — well, `weird' is a better word — but because of how the
scene developed, on its own." Then, having benefited from the
controversy, many bands associated with black metal had to figure out
a way to live it down.

Enslaved did it by persevering and by changing: The members
view "Monumension," an excellent and mysterious-sounding album from
2001, as the beginning of a new phase. And in Norway the members of
Enslaved are settling into their unlikely roles as respected
veterans. Oddly enough, the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Church
Affairs sponsored a collaboration between members of Enslaved and the
noisy electronic duo Fe-mail. The hybrid group is called Trinacria
(you can hear live tracks at myspace.com/trinacriamusic), and a full-
length album is due next year. Extreme metal, which once seemed like
a threat to Norway's cultural heritage, is inevitably coming to be
seen as part of it. How long before the government finances an ad
campaign, inviting black-metal fans from around the world to come to
the most evil country on Earth?

Certainly some sort of cultural exchange program seemed to be under
way at the Crocodile Rock on Tuesday, where Mr. Kjellson kept
saying, "You having a good time, Allentown?" Or, "Thank you,
Allentown, Pennsylvania." Or, "This is the last song for tonight,
Allentown."

Before long, the city name was starting to sound like a curse word,
or maybe just a reminder that the life of a touring extreme-metal
band is hard work. But Mr. Kjellson surely knows that the genre's
popularity in a handful of European countries is the exception, not
the rule. Around the world metal endures — and, in its own
subterranean way, flourishes — in nooks and crannies.

It was now early on Wednesday morning in empty downtown Allentown,
and the small crowd in the big club remained. As the band prepared to
play the savage title track from "Isa," Mr. Kjellson said, "I guess
most of you already know this one." And he guessed right.