SubRosa correlates to The Decemberists, but where even the latter’s most sincere moments seem to have a warm glow around — based on the same glow from its primary songwriter, Colin Meloy — these seeming period pieces ride the moods of Rebecca Vernon, who holds Meloy’s position for this group. The discomfort comes a bit from the vague worry that Vernon hasn’t been playing a character, and the gothic dystopias she waxes correspond to something in her corner of the world. Multiple vocalists and multiple violinists set the stage for her shanties, but there is only one guitar. Vernon steers the ship, to safe harbor, or to the rocks.

Thomas Gabriel Fischer bore Triptykon out of his frustration with Celtic Frost, which sputtered out amid chilly disagreements, and the aggression sustained the band’s first release. Several years later, calmed perhaps (yet only so much…this is one of the most influential figures in extreme music after all), Fischer came back to the studio. Melana Chasmata kicks off with the second-best metal track of the decade, picking up where Eparistera Daimones had left off, but it doesn’t take too long for the pace to slow. Fischer’s troubles linger, but the album portrays a man made tired by them, both in its turns to doom-like pace and lyrics focused on tragedy.

Cynical philosophers lamenting the repulsive nature of humanity may be onto something. Although the majority of death metal angles towards topics torn from the news — murder and macabre — the most uncomfortable often deals with the most mundane topics. If you found Carcass’s commentary on the omnivore diet was too much, you should steer clear of Vastum, who focuses on sex. Not the weird kind, necessarily, but the “normal” kind; normal in quotations because when you think about it, as Vastum forces you, sex is a bizarre, repulsive act. That it remains the most addicting of human pleasures in spite of this is quite fascinating.

Mike IX Williams has both, for lack of a better term, done some shit and had some shit happen to him, and boy does his voice sound like it. Comparing the travails of self-described white trash to the more academically pleasing songsmiths of the Delta Blues is worth wariness, but the drawl and even occasional boogie heard from the massive stacks behind any Eyehategod recording speaks to the local knowledge among these New Orleans hoodlums. It’s different social strata’s Sultans of Swing, soundtracking a case of Black Labels on a good day, and crushing addiction on a bad one, at a bar where blues “devotees” like Mark Knopfler would never stick their necks.

Tomb’s Mold’s last album, Manor of Infinite Forms, invites those who thought themselves edgy during freshman year to tie in references to the novel House of Leaves. Spoiler alert for both book and the band’s sound: The house is bigger on the inside than on the outside. An apt comparison for this death metal band, which doesn’t go as far out of its way as, say, Blood Incantation, to declare its progressive nature. Rather, a less-careful listening might come across as rather straightforward, old-school death metal. But the riffs in these tight tracks wrap uncomfortably among themselves like the pumpkin guts its logo resembles.