Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
One of the biggest challenges and frustrations of a column like this is the constant sense of looking back and going, “Why didn’t I…” For instance, take the band Hemotoxin who put out the brilliant and very Death-driven record When Time Becomes Loss in May, a record that I spent most of June jamming relentlessly but had sadly missed its window. Why wouldn’t I, you might think, simply add it in? After all, as we’ve long established, this is our column, and even our definition of what constitutes amenably coverable music for a heavy column is sometimes deliberately slippery. This hits the other frustration, a good frustration: there seems always to be more music than we know what to do with. Any feature is measured inevitably against what it might replace; our lists for any given month’s column typically have Colin and I listing off 12 or 15 bands, themselves culled from much longer lists we individually develop.
For the sake of being academic about this, I shall briefly list a series of records literally just from July that were in contention and, in all fairness, also deserve your attention. Consider this a bonus for those of you that read the intros! There is post-punky atmospheric black metal debut from Vuur & Zijde, the always grave-scented bleak death metal of a returning Vanhelgd, the shockingly well-balanced orchestral death metal debut from Rhaug, the progressive and deeply abstract post-Gorguts black metal of Conglaciation, and the triumphant, nearly classic rock-inflected black metal of Vimur. To remind you, these are all albums that came out this month, strongly worthwhile records that simply came up against equally worthwhile peers.
This is a strange world. A month or two ago, I was resigned to seeing an open fascist climb to the head of state again and reconfigure the state apparatus at home to behave the way it always has abroad. Suddenly, a window appeared and it seems we may have a way out of that fate, at least for now. My life after marriage is slow and peaceful, even if socializing on the autism spectrum, being agender, navigating queerness are always labyrinths of the self. Through all these things, the gnarled and ruined terrain of extreme metal replenishes itself. Life is comprised of a seemingly never-ending series of contradictions, moving but rarely fully resolving. This perpetuity of heavy metal is more than a minor gift. I’m not an art idealist; all the assembled might of the collective outrage of the artists of the Western world didn’t slow let alone terminate the Vietnam war, and for every great novel and painting, no step of the Nazi’s march across Europe decades ago was dissuaded by a work of art. But as solace in a confusing and at times terrifying world, it is a constancy of renewal.
– Langdon Hickman