Heavy-Metal Culture -- It's Decadent. It's Defiant. It's Rebellious. It's Heavy-Metal Music. And The Kids In The Towns Of South King County Are Eating It Up.

It's "Kiss Night" at the Off Ramp Cafe & Lounge in Seattle, and though the music hasn't started yet the place is already roaring.

Motorcycles crowd the sidewalk outside and there're no seats left in the smoke-filled interior, where a waitress in a short lace dress and knee-high boots has to push past chairs and the leather-clad customers loitering over packed tables.

In the next room, the stage is being set for tonight's heavy-metal show: A dozen local bands will cover songs from the '70s cult-band, Kiss, famous for face-paint and the bass player's mythic 7-inch tongue.

But though the scene is unmistakably Seattle underground, the bands themselves are often immigrants from the fringes of the city - especially from the quiet suburbs of Kent, Auburn and Federal Way.

The surreal landscape of these South King County communities - where endless parking lots and shopping malls substitute for chic clubs - is the spawning ground for much of the region's heavy-metal culture.

At home among the regulars at the Off Ramp tonight is Federal Way native Jeff Braimes, lead singer for the South End group, Panic.

"Metal is really a suburban thing. It's so boring there," says Braimes, 26, who came early to down a beer before the show.

"In Seattle you are surrounded by real life, whereas in the suburbs, you just drive around all the time. You get in your car and go to the mall . . . the supermarket. . . . You're detatched."

Less intellectual than punk, more raw than rock, heavy metal is the music of choice for many suburban teenagers.

Braimes and his friend, Marty Chandler, 24, guitarist for Panic, say they're typical of South End youths who learn their music alone in their rooms after school and end up on stage in Seattle clubs like the Off Ramp.

Between interruptions from Panic fans, who keep leaning over the walls of their booth, Braimes explains how metal mania is born among adolescents who have little to do besides, "sitting in their rooms, listening to music, smoking pot."

"The people really into metal are the young kids," he says. "When they move out of their parents' house and become self-sufficient, they lose interest. They grow out of it."

Both Braimes and Chandler say they hail from working-class homes and now earn their living at jobs they hate. Chandler works nights at an audio equipment company and Braimes does landscaping. Music is both their chief outlet and their hope for future livelihood.

Their brand of heavy metal, says Braimes, is "decadence magnified. It's defiance, rebellion. You've got society so weighted towards a conservative point of view, you need something on the other end of the spectrum."

But though rebellion and rejection of social norms lie at the core of the metal ethos, the metalheads from South King County seem, at closer inspection to be, well, decent guys whose chief aim is to make a living at more than $6 an hour.

Long hair and tattoos, say some, are as much tradition as anything else, and band names like Panic, Condemned, No Avail, Necromancy, Mad Hatter, Daterape, Unearth, Seditionaries and Metal Church often seem to disguise a preference for American cars and solid blue-collar values.

True to form, Braimes and Chandler are drinking Budweiser and smoking Marlboros tonight. They say they eschew the glitz and hair mousse favored by more mainstream metal bands.

Both wear their hair belly-length and sport tattoos of skulls and pierced eyeballs. But jeans and T-shirts betray their proletarian slant.

"Metal can be polished, dressed up. But what we do is honest," Braimes contends.

It's also marketable:

"It all boils down to appearance, luck, timing," Braimes says of the band's recent good fortune. They just released their first album, "Epidemic, " (says Chandler: "We want it to spread like a virus"), and are leaving soon for their first West Coast tour.

Beyond the limits of South King County, where heavy-metal records and tapes are an eternal best-seller at record stores, the depth of metal fanaticism is hard to gauge.

Despite the huge success of popular metal bands like Guns 'n Roses and Metallica, local metal fans say "grunge," a slower, swaying form of alternative rock, has taken over the Seattle club scene, leaving metal enthusiasts to stew in the suburbs.

Grunge, metal and punk, staple genres of Seattle's music underground, contain within them a bewildering array of subheadings:

Fine distinctions among thrashmetal, Satanmetal, powermetal, funkmetal, deathmetal, punk-Metal crossover music - and the dubious compound called Christian Metal - are difficult even for insiders to draw.

"Grunge would be like someone heavy stepping on your toe," explains Lance Goodwin, veteran metal-watcher who works at Bubble Records and Compact Discs on Kent's East Hill. "Thrashmetal is like someone hitting you in the face with a brick."

But he backtracks, dissatisfied.

"No, that's not really fair. I guess Grunge is more like being hit in the face with a fist. That's it, grunge is the fist, metal's a brick."

Chandler offers a less allegorical definition:

"Heavy metal is just a power outlet for kids," he says, as icecubes zing overhead from a food fight in the next booth.

"It's about getting aggression out. If not heavy metal, than what are these kids going to do? This is what these kids need to get them through their pitiful lives."

The raw, masculine energy of heavy metal is abundant on Kiss Night.

Fans carry their drinks to the stage area as the bands get ready to play. Clouds of cigarette smoke drift overhead.

The crowd is noisy but well-behaved. Girls in black lace and bare midriffs, and stringy haired guys, mill about or huddle above on the terraces leading up from the stage.

The show is so disorganized that the bands that are supposed to play have dispersed and their fellow band members have to keep calling each other up to the stage over the microphones.

Finally, a band is ready. The bass player strums the first heavy bars and the lead singer bursts forth with an animal screech.

Long lank hair, its purpose mysterious until now, suddenly comes to life on the dance floor as two dozen heads begin thrashing up and down.

Dredlocks, perms and ponytails flog the stage in unison. From above, all you see is an enormous mass of hair, swaying rhythmically.

The more self-conscious spectators make room for the frenzied, all-male crowd of hair-whippers and slam dancers, shirtless and sweaty beneath the stage.

Unlike punk, which was known for its uncompromising leftist bent, heavy metal is rife with political contradictions.

Goodwin of Bubble Records calls most bands in the Kent area "pretty liberal," a viewpoint many band members share.

But the area's most famous band, Metal Church, includes on its newest album, billed as a tribute to working-class values, a love-it-or-leave-it song lambasting flag burners.

And both Condemned and another Kent-area band, No Avail, say they've written songs against abortion.

"We think it's wrong to use it as birth control," said Jere Sweet, bass player for No Avail.

"There shouldn't be a need for it," said Paul Chandler, bass player for Condemned and Marty's younger brother.

Even Daterape, the leftist punk-metal band from Kent, is hard to pin down when it comes to politics. Mike Esparza, guitarist for the group, says Daterape makes an effort to lash out against racism and sexism found in the lyrics of some famous metal bands.

But he said the band's one song about sexual violence tells women "don't be so ignorant. Don't go out dressed in a certain way. You may not know what'll happen to you."

Chandler of Panic says there's no unifying social message behind the South End's heavy-metal music.

"I don't think we are intelligent enough to be political," he says, shrugging.

"What's behind a lot of heavy metal is just anger," says Russ Kroeker, drummer for Condemned, who at 21 has a wife, a 16-month old daughter, and a job as an electrician's assistant. "It's not political, it's just anger towards a lot of things. You can whine about the government all you want but you run out of topics."

"We are like everyone else," he adds. "Our main goal is to make a living off something we don't hate."