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.
I do not feel well.
I don’t mean the obvious. There is fascism rotting not just our nation but the world, fascism so bad that common folk have begun calling it what it is and not just the communists and anarchists I spend most of my time with. The government shutdown, an event engineered by one party alone, exists solely to squeeze to death the programs they couldn’t cancel the funding for through legal means, permanently crippling only the social subsidies that they deem unfit. Utah has approved a “word-conditioned housing” facility, which is legalese for a force labor camp, which in turn is outright slavery and either a kiss away or full into the early stages of concentration camp actions of the Nazi state. Common people are struggling financially and this causes us to fall into despair, thrash and wound one another, or indulge in escapism that’s tooth-rottingly sweet in its vapidity to dull the pain, like an alcoholic sipping at the bottle.
I do not mean these things. These things, while real, are in fact so real that they are felt by all of us. Our days, all of ours, are marked by means of trying to get by, to hang together for ourselves, our loved ones, our communities.
I mean I do not feel well in a recurrent existential way. Fall is the season of death for me; October, in fact, is the year of the birthday of both my father, gone now for 14 years, and my grandmother, his mother, gone for about half that. Anyone who has lost a parent will be able to tell you the universal experience it seems to induce where suddenly you begin to reckon, even if you think you have before, with the weight of your entire genetic inheritance, billions of years of matter and life amounting to you, a bare nothing, this vibrating membrane synthesizing the enormity of that past event-matter toward some future-matter. I don’t have anxieties about having children; I think we often prize our genetic legacies over the far vaster and more enduring legacies our actions, thoughts, and presence leave in the world. I feel unwell because a continual shameful weight I bear is this bone-deep sense that either I am failing, being nothing, disappearing.
I say this for a few reasons. First, transparency about mental health and its realities, both biochemical and contextual, is important. I have medication, therapy, a devout and loving wife, an incredible and supportive family, and friends who care deeply for me. I have fulfilling work. This trembling death-sense is agnostic to all of it. The other reason I mention it is that when I, or people like me, like you maybe, discuss why we love this music, not just the anthemic and beer-soaked (though God I love that too) but the intensely bleak and morose, it is because of this reason. So much of this feeling is feeling alone. The poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud slice through that; the works of the Surrealists; the film work of Ingmar Bergman and Bela Tarr; and, yes, the gothic and the doomed within heavy metal. I listened to Clearing a Path to Ascend by Yob as I walked through the woods behind my grandparents house, my father’s parents, after both they and he had died, knowing I would never be in those trees that shaped over 30 years of my life ever again. I happened to approach the house just as “Marrow” was reaching its conclusion. To those who have heard the album, I don’t think I need to explain the emotional necessity of that moment, the comforting arm and compassionate weeping with me. Compassion, fittingly, means to suffer together.
And yet, despite all of this, gothic metal often sucks. It’s just plain awful a lot of the time. Just terrible. And the fact that these kinds of morose ponderings can sit next to me listening to some operatic vocal over extremely bland melodic death metal with bad keyboard patches going, “God, this really sucks,” is just very funny to me. That the world refuses to be one thing or one emotional color but is persistently, annoyingly all of them all at once permanently is… Well. Hm.
— Langdon Hickman
