Jason Netherton has been a presence in the death metal underground for two decades, this Marylander a founding member of both DYING FETUS and MISERY INDEX while overseeing online metal archive Send Back My Stamps. Currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Western Ontario, Netherton has transcribed the plethora of interviews he's conducted with notable members of the death metal scene during his many world-wide tour escapades and has collected them here in Extremity Retained, a true archive of death metal in its various incarnations. Lovingly assembled and far-reaching in scope, Extremity Retained recounts death metal and all that has surrounded it, from the recording process and the road, to tape-trading and fanzines. Given his unparalleled access, Netherton has conducted interviews with a veritable who’s who of death metal and Extremity Retained benefits from it, the book an exhaustive and insightful tome into death metal as a subculture and an all-consuming way of life. The most intriguing aspect that Extremity Retained presents with regard to the death metal scene is, ironically, its humanity: when members of CANNIBAL CORPSE recount the first time they signed autographs in Europe and the surrealism that accompanied it (“Back in Buffalo we were just a bunch of guys”), the sense of how those embroiled in death metal constantly straddle the (thin) line between ‘fame’ and a very ordinary existence at home becomes reality. In that vein, and much like the stories recounted in Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal or Albert Mudrian’s Choosing Death, it’s always fascinating to read of the immense importance of letters and the tape trading network. For all of death metal’s reclusion from the outside world, the sense of community that was created through those fifth generation copies housed in a TDK 60 (Type II only, please!) and hand-written missives from northern Europe is inspiring, even if one wonders how much of a role nostalgia plays in that particular fascination street (i.e. here’s full disclosure of my tape trading days back during the ‘90s). Though Extremity Retained joins a growing legion of academic works that examine extreme metal subcultures, Netherton has done important work in cataloguing a one-time nascent scene that eventually may have become too big to fulfill its original mandate.