For a taste of how Boulder "mongrelized moribund metal" duo Spawn of the Matriarch combines grad-school academics with a love of heavy music, look no further than the first track on the band's self-titled debut.

On one level, "Abominable Pastiche" is a five-minute blast of head-banging, bone-crushing death metal, complete with the thrashing guitars, mythological allusions and guttural monster noises you'd expect from the genre. But beyond that, the track is a friendly jab at Hobbit-obsessed metalheads whose songwriting tends to cross the line into bad fan fiction; an abomination of the original story.

"You hear a lot of metal lyrics that are inspired by Tolkien or HP Lovecraft and all the gods and creatures he came up with, but you never hear both of them together in the same song," says guitarist Kirk Ott. "So I imagined that these two literary pantheons started battling against each other for supremacy."

And honestly, what kind of metal band throws around words like "pastiche," a term from postmodern literary criticism describing the unironic imitation of assorted earlier works of art?

Enter Ott, AKA El Otro, and Ross Hagen, AKA Diazuegmenon, two soft-spoken CU intellectuals pursuing master's degrees in religious studies and musicology respectively. With Ott on guitar and vocals, Hagen on bass and vocals and a drum machine/otherworldly silicon-based entity they call Xylophobe keeping electronic time, the two comprise a band based both around rocking out and embracing the pop mythology behind heavy metal.

The duo formed in 2003 and self-released a four-song CD last month.

Over cups of unpronounceable varieties of green tea at Boulder's Dushanbe Tea House, they discuss "SotM" and the album they recorded on a computer in Hagen's bedroom, screaming vocal tracks into the closet so as to frighten only his pet rats.

The location is apropos because the two have fashioned an esoteric backstory around the band that, according to press materials, "begins in the forbidding environs of Dushanbe, Tajikistan, where their uncompromising mongrelization faced severe oppression within a culture even more harsh and mysterious than that of northern Europe."

Plus, Hagen says, the two are more likely to be sipping Tajik tea before rehearsal than getting fired up with Jager shots like a lot of heavy bands. Today he's drinking a brew made from tea leaves that have been buried to ferment.

"The most 'metal' of teas," Ott adds.

They're kidding, sort of. They don't really expect people to believe that "Diazuegmenon, a porter by trade, survives as the sole heir to and proprietor of a vast lard-rendering fortune," or that "El Otro, trained as a lathe operator, comes from sturdy peasant stock, exhibiting the cleft, sweeping brow and deep-set, penetrating shins of the noble laborer..."

"I see it all as part of the creation," Ott explains. "We create music, and we create personas for ourselves."

The mystifying biography is also one way Hagen and Ott seek to connect their band to the rituals, folklore and occult literature that have shaped the metal genre. Hagen should know; he's writing his master's thesis on music and mythology in Scandinavian black metal.

"I've spent time with it as a fan and an academic," he says. "It'd probably be a hard thing to study if you weren't already a fan."

Spawn of the Matriarch plays its first "performance of the Xylophobic ritual"  i.e. "show" Sunday at the Larimer Lounge in Denver. The ritual is 21+ "to allow for the consumption of the Necrophorous Nectar as required by the ceremony."