Love may not be the first emotion you associate with metal, but if you talk to the musicians responsible for the heavy sounds coming out of Los Angeles in recent years, it's gonna come up.

"We're not the biggest band in the world, but we're doing what we love to do around the people we love to be around," SpineShank drummer Tom Decker said, capturing the credo that seems to bind a select band of West Coast hard-rock frontiersmen. Under the gnashing guitars and growling vocals of Fear Factory, Coal Chamber, System Of A Down, Static-X, SpineShank, and others, there's a lot of love and respect going on.

The notion that a culture of mutual support and cooperation can yield a vibrant music scene is nothing new. It happened in San Francisco in the '60s, Athens in the '70s, and Seattle in the early '90s. The burgeoning heavy music scene in L.A. may not have reached the saturation level that maxed out those musical movements, but these are good days for headbanging Los Angelinos.

To the uninitiated, the words "L.A. metal" may conjure up thoughts of Motley Crue, Ratt, Guns N' Roses, and the legions of guitar-slingers who descended on the Sunset Strip after Van Halen painted a big fat bullseye on it in the early '80s.

But oh, what a difference a decade makes.

Tackling weightier themes and churning out much darker sounds, a bold new breed has emerged from the very same clubs that gave the world the Aqua Net and sequins of L.A.'s days of yore. These bands have turned their time on the Strip into major-label contracts and national tours... and if you ask any of them, they'll gladly tell you that they couldn't have done it without the help of what some call the brotherhood of L.A.

As this summer's Ozzfest kicks off this week in Florida, the brotherhood is well represented. The '99 edition of the heavy music caravan reaches deep into the L.A. metal pool, tapping Fear Factory, System Of A Down, Static-X, and hed (pe), and in doing so notches another small victory for one of the more vibrant scenes going today.

For Fear Factory, this summer's Ozzfest gig is only the latest step on a path that began almost 10 years ago with the band playing in backyards for anyone who would listen.

"We had a lot of friends in bands," Fear Factory frontman Burton Bell recalled, "and we would hang out with them and we would say, 'Hey, can you put us on a gig? We'll open up. We don't care where you put us, just can we play with you?'"

However, there didn't seem to be room for a forward-thinking, sci-fi influenced concept band like Fear Factory in L.A. as the '80s were giving way to the '90s.

"When I first moved here," said Bell, "the trend was... it was the Guns N' Roses trend dying, with bands like Junkyard and s**t like that."

"That's one thing I really didn't want to become, is one of those bands that sing about sex, drugs, and rock and roll," Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares recalled of those days. "I mean, to me there was always much more than that in music."