Scene and heard: Necromantic rock  A reaction to the less
savoury elements of black metal, Norway's hard rockers are
dragging heavy music into the 21st century  Nekromantik, the
controversial career highlight of German movie director Jörg
Buttgereit, is a film that stays with you. It is, after all,
rife with depictions of murder, suicide, self-abuse and,
predominantly, corpse-based copulation. More than 20 years
later, Buttgereit's 1987 censor-baiter has become unlikely
thematic inspiration for a wave of warped guitar-slingers
flooding out of the Norwegian capital Oslo. Gladly, these
discordant bands don't do the bad thing with deceased folk,
preferring instead to breathe new life into what they see as a
dead native rock scene.  Taking the dissonance of Nordic black
metal but losing the dubious undercurrents of nationalism (and
worse) that have dogged the Scandinavian musical counterculture,
these bands make a racket inspired by American noise rock and
British hardcore punk. The intellectualism of black metal