If you're a hardcore fan of underground horror / metal / occult art and visuals and only buy one art book this year, it's gotta be Entartete Kunts. I've been looking forward to this thing ever since Ajna first announced it was coming out - this 340 page monster is filled with pretty much every visual artist of note to have come out of the metal/punk underground over the past three decades. The title is a play on the German anti-Modernist movement "entartete kunst" that sprung up in the 1930s and attacked the avant-garde in music and the arts, and which reached a fever-pitch of idiocy with a now legendary exhibition in Munich in 1937 that served as the inspiration for Dennis Dread's ongoing gallery project in the modern day. Beginning in 2007, Dread began to stage an ambitious series of art exhibitions in Portland, Oregon that featured a selection of famed subterranean artists, and this event took on a life of its own, expanding into larger environs in subsequent years.

Many of you no doubt recognize Dennis Dread from his amazing artwork that has adorned albums from the likes of Darkthrone, Abscess, Abigail and Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising soundtrack on Ajna, but this guy has also been one of the hardest working advocates for true dark art through a variety of projects that also includes his awesome art-zine Destroying Angels. So its little surprise that Dread managed to curate the kind of lineup that he did for the Entartete Kunts events; between 2007 and 2009, Dread exhibited works from extreme metal/punk visionaries Chris Reifert (Autopsy), Kristian Wahlin (aka Necrolord), Paul Henri Toorenvliet (Lugubrum), Richard Sayer (aka French), Jason Storey, Pasquale Reca (Villains), Musta Aurinko, Erik Danielsson (Watain), Rich Rethorn, Kriss Hades (Sadistik Exekution), Chanel Adair (Lebenden Toten), Luisma Quiroga (Haemorrhage), Rob Miller (Amebix), Lorenzo Mariani, Ross Sewage (Ludicra), Reuben Storey, Paul McCarroll (Scald), Drew Elliott, Andrei Bouzikov, Strephon Taylor (Sacrilege B.C.), Sean McGrath (Impaled), Nor Prego Argibay, Sean Taggart, Conny Cobra, Sean Asberg, Michel "Away" Langevin (Voivod), Nick Blonko (Rudimentary Peni), Mark Riddick, Glenn Smith, Joe Petagno, Timo Ketola, Scott Stearns (Bibilic Blood), Ed Repka, Stephen Blickenstaff and even Dennis Dread himself, while dark fantasists and occultists like Arik Roper, Bobby BeauSoleil, and Jos. A. Smith (whose artwork from Erica Jong's Witches ended up being appropriated by Bathory into of the most iconic black metal images ever) are also featured, alongside underground comics/zine extremists like S. Clay Wilson, Jim Blanchard, Frank Russo, and Jeff Gaither.

And all of these artists have been gathered here for Dread's Entartete Kunts, an eye-melting, three hundred and forty page book that documents the entire run of the exhibition, featuring various pieces from each artist along with text from Dread on the history and impact these artists have had on underground music/art. With a mix of full-color and black and white art spread across the hundreds of images collected here, there's a lot to feed your eyes with, a bounty of pestilent graveyard fantasies and retina-shocking, gore-drenched comics, otherworldly panoramas and Satanic symbolist visions, repulsive psychedelic monstrosities and nightmarish pen-and-ink mutations, rounded out by an introduction written by Dennis Dread and a foreword from renowned underground comics historian Patrick Rosenkranz (Rebel Visions: Underground Comix. If you're the sort of person that would spend just as much time gazing at the artwork on the cover of your favorite death metal or hardcore punk album as you would reading through the lyrics, you're going to love this book. Hands down the best underground/metal art book you're going to see this year. Available as both a high-quality soft cover edition and a more limited, deluxe hardcover limited to four hundred copies.