h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What's wrong with this picture?

Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir - Black Metal? Symphonic Pop Black Metal more like it. Mayhem, Darkthrone, Satyricon, Emperor, Anaal Nathrakh, Frost, Ulver, Reign of Erebus - these are black metal bands whose philosophies actually come close to the Black Metal attitude etc. Cradle admittedly were Black Metal but only really for their first album, their music is mainly "horror metal" in style, highly commercialised and fully aimed at the mainstream market - can't blame them but it's definitely not black metal.

Dimmu Borgir again are just too commercial for this scene and unfortunately for them, they seem doomed to always be chasing Cradle's coat tails even if they are musically the better band.

Thrash metal tends to revolve around the darker side of life? Thrash in the main was a replacement for punk and many of it's major exponents were trying to draw attention to social issues and moral issues. Because something sounds dark it doesn't make it so. Examples include Metallica's "And Justice For All", Sacred Reich's "The American Way", Anthrax's "Persistence of Time", Atrophy's "Violent by Nature" and so on. I'd agree that it's less "anti-christian" than some other scenes but band's in this scene did (and do) comment on the evil's of religion and Slayer were primary among them.

Speed Metal? - surely Megadeth are the best known example of this genre, though most folk would argue that it's almost indistinguishable from Thrash and for me Testament were a thrash act.

And I think I dispute that any of the acts listed in this article are really underground. All of them are either on major labels and/or the biggest metal labels. Underground acts are those you rarely hear of, where only a few thousand globally listen to them, their songs are traded and often their CD's are difficult to get hold of etc. Rather than being found in the metal section of HMV.

Respect to you for trying to define underground metal scenes - rather less respect I'm afraid for the content.

I'm sorry but the Philosophy of a band doesn't have any effect on its musical classification and neither does the level of commercial success achieved...