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.
As of late, more often than not, I’ve longed for the window-dressing Bathory perfected early in their career, of darkness and evil returning and leaving it at that. This is in contrast to black metal as an unsuccessful vessel for individuality, bogged down by further layers of anachronistic nonsense or fantastical visions of how the world should be, rather than exorcising the pressures of living through profane methods. Death metal is free to be stupid and bloody, whereas black metal stares at itself in the mirror for too long, self-serious and narcissistic, oxymoronically judging itself for being itself and carrying around baggage like an egocentric wannabe comedian coworker. I think that’s why, especially over the past few months, I’ve been drawn more to the thematically simpler black metal acts as well as those who sidestep the deluge that comes from black metal with a furnished recording studio.
To name names, Vampyric Rites, Ysbrydnos, and Ebony Pendant. Acts that look out their window to see what goes bump in the night. The headiest project I’ve enjoyed is Grave Pilgrim’s The Pungent Wine of Pride, if only because its treatise on how individualism can be poisonous in extreme doses is buried beneath raw blackened punk that the whole family can enjoy. Please note that I’m not saying that music should forego any ambitions to engage with larger concepts or exile itself to escapism. Simply, I’ve moved away from metal that concentrates too hard on what it’s doing and how it does it that it ceases to be music to me and more an exercise for the artist. It’s like a tennis player monitoring their backhand form and trying to improve it, neurotically pulling themselves inwards but failing to connect with the shot. Their methodology is correct but their execution is clunky. In their effort to sharpen their shot, they focus on what a backhand should be like and how to get their backhand to be like that, rather than feeling the movement itself.
There’s a thematic clarity and simplicity to bands I’ve been enamored with over the past bit that makes them not necessarily easier to get into but enables enmeshment to a deeper degree. The artist’s persona is still there, but it feels more like a vessel for one to engage with rather than a statement piece in which one party can only be an observer. This is an issue I usually only run into with black metal because of its intentional self-ostracizing, one-man projects, and nihilism. It doesn’t want to be heard by those who will not take it on its terms. I’m being careful not to dismiss all of black metal or state that this is an issue with the genre itself rather than my preference. Wampyric Rites and Ebony Pendant revel in how off-putting they are, but never get bogged down by that being a pretense for something else. They’re harsh and dark because harshness and darkness are cool. They’re inversions of the world, the soot-stained chimneys and unsanded edges modernity doesn’t accept because they’re not consumer friendly or “fit for distribution.” and, of course, some will say that my gravitation towards certain sounds and bands in black metal proves that the genre’s gatekeeping is working. And, they’re right! It is! But my point is that they’re keeping me out of places I don’t want to be anyways.
Perhaps I just want to be in worlds with shitty production and occult themes and a distinct otherness, musical soundscapes that could not exist during our waking days so they only thrive in recorded scenarios. I don’t need the baggage that they peer into the Qlipthothic mantras circulating our realm or hyperfixate misanthrophic malaise. I’ll do that myself. Not all of June’s releases fit this mold, varying from symphonic black metal to “Bohren & der Club of Gore play death metal” to the insanity Langdon listened to this month, but they all, in their own ways, made me place themselves within their worlds and excited me to do so.
– Colin Dempsey
