When LA indie smart-ass Travis Keller was looking for a place to showcase his rock photography a few years ago, he registered the Internet domain buddyhead.com on a whim. Since then, the site has blossomed into one of indie rock’s funniest and most notorious Web ’zines, thanks in part to an indispensable, iconoclastic gossip page that’s raised the public ire of Fred Durst and Courtney Love, among others. Along the way, Keller also started up the Buddyhead record label, with releases from At the Drive-In, Murder City Devils, and Ink & Dagger.

Those three groups may be history, but on their debut full-length, Mono (Crank!), Buddyhead house band the Icarus Line — who with Keller’s Buddyhead co-conspirator Aaron North on guitar come to the Middle East this Friday — sound more than ready to carry the torch for deranged, full-blast indie skronk. Keller is on tour with the band selling merchandise, and Boston’s Cave In (who pass the buddyhead.com test because they "like to bang gash and they sold out the scene") are along for the ride. And, as the site notes, the tour is the "perfect chance you’ve been waiting for to have Travis and Aaron together in one place so you can beat us up."

Durst, for one, has repeatedly threatened to do just that, but so far Keller hasn’t found any takers. "It’s a lot of fun when people don’t get the joke, but I like it better when they actually get it," he says over the phone from North Carolina. "I met Hot Water Music when my friend was playing some shows with them. I was like, ‘Aw shit, these guys are going to hate me,’ because we fucked up their record. But the bass player was like, ‘Holy shit, I’m such a big fan! I love that you guys make fun of me for playing my bass too high.’ I mean, I honestly don’t even know what Hot Water Music sounds like. I know the guy has a gruff voice and I’m not really into them, but I don’t really give a crap either way. I thought it was funny that they didn’t either."

Other favorite Buddyhead targets include the Strokes, new metal, and pretty much any post-Blink-182 pop-punk band; Tool, Guns N’ Roses, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard head up the short list of untouchables. Lately, the site has been receiving so much traffic that Keller had to start a donation drive to raise money to buy a new server. "It’s kind of funny, there’s all these people reading our site, yet we can’t buy a burrito, let alone pay rent or pay our server costs. We didn’t want to make it a pay site, so we based it on the whole shareware system. You know, if you like reading it and you want it to stay around, then it would be cool if you gave us a couple bucks. But if you don’t, enjoy it anyway, and hopefully it stays around. So far, it seems like it’s been working. We’ve been getting a lot of small donations and a couple of rather large ones."

One of the largest came from Courtney Love, who coughed up $1000 and has also been spotted talking up the site in the press. Affectionately referred to as C-Love on the gossip page, she originally befriended Buddyhead the same way she does everybody else: she tried to sue them. "We called her a crack whore or something," says Keller. "But I think her thing is if she can’t beat us, she’ll try to join us. We’ve never met her or anything, and we still made fun of her the last time we updated the gossip. But we thanked her and everything. It was really nice of her."

Cave In, the Icarus Line, and the Cancer Conspiracy perform this Friday, December 7, at 9 p.m. at the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave in Central Square. Call (617) 864-EAST.