CUPERTINO, Calif. — There aren’t too many mean-looking things in Cupertino, this sleepy Silicon Valley haunt of Apple employees and overachieving middle schoolers.
But there’s something gruesome growing in one corner of town: Halo Custom Guitars Inc.
Fueled by a resurgence in heavy metal music, and its numerous dark sub-genres, Halo makes and sells evil-looking instruments with bodies carved to resemble rotting flesh, distended eyeballs and bone. The demonically themed guitars primarily find their way into the hands of death metal musicians.
Regular heavy metal music can cover the usual topics of scorn and despair, while death metal sub-genre leans heavily on growled vocals and themes such as Satanism and dark mythology.
Both are an important niche for electric guitar manufacturers such as 5-year-old Halo. It sold 200 guitars its first year in business and now sells 200 to 300 a month in direct sales and another 200 per month to dealers, said co-founder Waylon Ford.
“Ever since we started making more outrageous designs, we started selling more guitars,” he said. “We really owe a lot to the metal genre.”
Street teams of Halo guitar players and hangers-on keep the company’s buzz alive across the U.S., posting links to their favorite Halo-using bands on their MySpace pages and posting images of the lithesome Halo Gals, young models that appear in ads wearing little more than underworldly undergarments.
More established guitar makers are taking notice of metal’s rebirth as well. B.C. Rich Guitars boasts an aggressive looking lineup that includes the “Warbeast,” and “Warlock” according to the company’s Web site. The Warlock is pointy from all angles, while the Warbeast looks like a bit like a Fender Stratocaster with an attitude problem.
“B.C. Rich had a huge heyday in the ’80s, obviously when metal and big hair bands were all the rage,” said Ted Burger, a spokesman for Davitt &Hanser Music Group, the Hebron, Ky.-based parent company of B.C. Rich.
Then came the ’90s and Nirvana and grunge bands that wanted nothing to do with big hair or brightly colored guitars. Grunge bands sported unkempt hair, plaid shirts and let their standard guitars to the talking.
Now grunge is a trivia game answer and metal is king again.
“People just missed the pleasures of a nice piercing guitar solo,” Ford said.
The metal niche guitars fill a void that your regular old Fender Strat or Gibson Les Paul won’t. Those standard guitars look out of place in the hands of a growling 20-year-old lead metal guitarist wearing black nail polish and white face paint screaming into a microphone about Norse mythology.
Led Zeppelin’s heavy metal of the early 1970s gave way to an angrier, more puerile version. Metallica and Slayer are a couple of the current metal music standard-bearers, and still newer bands go even heavier on the face makeup and gloomy stage presence and themes of death.
The heaviest of heavy metal is well-represented on Apple’s iTunes, with downloads from bands such has Dismember, Cannibal Corpse and Hatebreed all available. And notably, Richmond, Va.-based Lamb of God, a death metal band, peaked on the Billboard album chart at No. 8 last year with “Sacrament,” further cementing metal’s comeback to broad acceptance.
So what exactly is the allure of the whole demonic metal scene? The deafening crunch of 8-string metal guitars on stage? The fake blood and white pancake makeup? The screamed “Cookie Monster” vocals few listeners can comprehend?
“‘Cause there’s always kids and your parents tell you not to listen to it,” Ford said. “It’s a really good outlet for your aggression.”
As for his mean guitar designs, Ford put it simply.
“Some people like skulls,” he said.
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