'Blood music'

As the most metal of metalheads will tell you, headbanging is just as effective when the volume is dialed down to a whisper. No one knows that lesson more than Dax Riggs, a veteran of the South's extreme metal community of the 1990s.

As the singer in a series of bands, including cult rockers Acid Bath, Riggs entered this decade older and wiser: His new band Deadboy & the Elephantmen released a single album of bluesy gothic rock that required Riggs to sing, not scream, opening up a wider musical vocabulary and garnering critical respect.

"I was kind of feeling I was in a dead end," he said. "Then I discovered Van Morrison and David Bowie, which both gave me a renewed interest in music."

Last summer Riggs released "We Only Sing of Blood Or Love" (Fat Possum), an album that turned up on many year-end best-of lists (including this writer's) and became a turning point in his career, leading to invitations to play before a wider audience. He made the bill at last summer's Lollapalooza and, after a string of playing small Chicago clubs, he arrives in town Thursday to headline Double Door.

The best album the White Stripes did not release last year, "Blood or Love" qualifies Riggs, 34, as a singer with extreme range who, like all great male rock singers, from Jim Morrison and Roky Erickson to Chris Cornell and Eddie Vedder, delivers brooding, anguished vocals that ratchet the songs high with emotional tension. Like those singers, Riggs understands the power of dynamics -- songs simmer low before bursting open and, even on dark, sludge-rockers like "Radiation Blues" or the quiet, synthesized "Terrors of Nightlife," Riggs sings with a churchly tenor.

Matt Sweeney, a long-time indie music veteran who served stints in Chavez, Billy Corgan'sˆ½ Zwan and Guided by Voices, co-produced and performed on "Blood or Love," lining the music with harsh edges but helping its spiritual highs explode with beauty. Surprisingly, the album's greatest influence was Fairport Convention, the British folk-rock group that launched the career of guitarist Richard Thompson and that played traditional songs by emphasizing their dark range and hidden metaphors.

"I guess I see the darkness in it," Riggs said. "It's actually heavier than what some people consider heavy. I was born into it."

Riggs learned about folk music through his grandfather, a musician and preacher who helped raise him while growing up with his mother in Evansville, Ind.

ˆ½"I always sang traditional cowboy songs, hillbilly music, when I was very young. Songs about people dying," he said. "I think that always stuck with me. I've always been more interested in music by dead people."

Eventually Riggs moved to Houma, La., in the deepest swamplands of that state, where his father worked on offshore oil rigs. The isolation helped unleash his imagination, and he started playing in bands. Although he recently moved to Austin, Tex., to be near a tighter-knit music community, his Houma days can be heard in the deeply twined themes of spirituality and sorrow in "Blood or Love." The music has almost gospel overtones; when Riggs played Subterranean last November, audience members were seen singing every note with their eyes shut as if at a Pentecostal ceremony.

Riggs, who said he battles depression, admits that even though feelings of isolation and paranoia went into the music, the results remain cathartic. "It's actually spiritually uplifting for me to let these things fly," he said.

Dax Riggs with Brighton MA

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago

Tickets: $12 (312) 559-1212