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.
Oh what a difference a month can make. Since the last installment of Mining Metal and this one, my life has certainly turned around. My desire to transfer out of my day job’s sector into writing full-time is apace at a mere 37 years old, I have an avenue to pay off my student debt which will allow me to go back to grad school to pursue my Master’s and PhD in literary and textual analysis and my brain’s infernal incessant roaring has finally quieted itself enough to return to a jester’s mirthful mad laughter again. It is a winding road, but with patience everything will one day change, from death to life and from life to death and everything between.
This touches, it turns out, on my feelings about “getting to the point.” This is often a shorthand meant to convey a desire to remain focused but is typically invoked instead to wave off the side avenues that in fact comprise most of life and indeed most knowledge. There is no way to learn a fact alone; sans contextual bed, it is a hanging empty signifier signifying nothing. The most exciting part of intellectual and emotional pursuits are in fact those jaunts which seem utterly unrelated, taken with the full faith that there is nothing in this world utterly disconnected from something else. The paths we chart between two disparate nodes in the vast tapestry of life offer so much insight, the treasure of a life, and are the real bed of wisdom when you hear someone speaking thoughtfully.
This is all to say that my affection for longer, abstruse music isn’t simply because I’ve melted my brain between mental health struggles and the elongated twisting corridors of academic thought, but also because it’s the good and wise thing to do. Jokes aside, this does underscore the emotional logic behind my love of the lengthy, the convoluted, the progressive, the technical, the surreal, the psychedelic. There are certainly things in life that are brutish in their simplicity, but so much of life for me has these hidden shoals teeming with life uncatalogued and unwitnessed. Art that is monoform and unidirectional tends not to capture those emotional contours and strikes me as false. It doesn’t have to be a winding epic, to be fair. Sometimes just a sharp emotional logic to an otherwise relatively direct piece suffices.
This in turn is what drives the very best of heavy metal, from the traditional and burly to the extreme depths of death, doom and black metal. The overriding sentiment is not on hooks or radio-approved corporatized conciseness but instead on a keen edge of emotional logic. If it’s short, that is for the same reason that the next track is long; you are describing the edges of a feeling and an experience, and you use the tools needed to do so until the task is done. Is there a finer art in the world than death metal? As someone who has studied art and texts for decades now, let me answer that directly: No. Death metal is the best.
— Langdon Hickman
