[ad_1]
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’ve been moving house with my wife, which has been the same kind of pain in the ass it has been for everyone since the dawn of time, and as such my finances have been run to the bone between all the varying expenses and surprise charges. As a result, while I had a luxurious -0.81 cents in my bank account (my wife and I have separate accounts, thank god), I decided to make myself some mac and cheese, a nice plain and cheap meal. In doing so, I sloshed boiling water, as in literally churning boil, directly onto the top of my foot, which resulted in what I would call a sub-optimal amount of footskin to operate with for the past few weeks. (It’s nearly healed now, just quite painful.) This, in a nutshell, seems to capture the American moment of the past month or so quite aptly. I’m certain you all read the news; no need to beleaguer you. The good news, however, is it seems everyone is taking it seriously, getting involved with local work like food banks or funding/providing housing for those in need to broader and more structural work like calling representatives, protesting, and whatever behaviors you lot may be up to that is best left to secure channels. (No judgment.) The benefit of this all means that me and Colin and our editorial crew can go back to talking about heavy metal. We love civic engagement.
This month, call it the mood, we split ourselves into two comfortable camps. Colin brought to the table some rather ripping black metal, his forte, including the new hotness from Havukruunu, who with their guitar heroics are like if Van Halen was reincarnated in Finland after being blasted in utero with Bathory records. Something fascinating to me however is how, over time, Colin has begun to lean a bit toward my side of things, offering some death metal, which isn’t too shocking from him, but also leaning toward some progressive material that definitely reads as more my bag than his, at least primarily. This freed me up to get weird. One of the records I present to you all this month is an unsigned one-man band’s debut record; I mention this both 1) yes, for some truly underground cred but 2) because you would not guess all of those things were true about the album were you to press play on it. Likewise, another record I present for you all is the newest record from a superlatively productive one-man project build around moss and frogs that I’ve been following for quite some time. I look through literally hundreds of records every month to curate these choices and the artist Phyllomedusa just kept cropping up. This month, I gave them a shot, and I was greeted with something best described as the Slipknot debut covered by a gore-noise group. It’s thrilling. The last peculiarity I want to point you toward is an Italian one-man band marketed as doom metal but, under the surface, really just a neo-prog band with incredibly bad cover art and wildly good compositions and playing.
These underground thrills are something that routinely brings me back to music as a perpetual grounding method as well as a method of extension via imagination. My autism means I get overwhelmed by the shape of life easily; I find it incredibly hard to shut out thoughts, which is why I can be so monomaniacal at times regarding art criticism or politics or systems critique or even just hundred-percenting a video game. Bigger mainstream records and the calmer spaces of jazz and electronic music have been nourishing me recently, as has a return to pawing through some alternative rock that I never got around to like the group Felt, who are like Low if they formed in 81, or just returning back to Nevermind which I haven’t really sat with in years. (Hey, these Nirvana cats are pretty good!) All of this has made the perpetual dives back into the world of deeply, incredibly underground metal, the kind with one or two releases total and no record label, so reinvigorating. I am reminded as well by reading novels from the fascist states of France in the early 50s and Italy in the 70s that art persists because the human spirit persists. Suffering does not generate great art, despite the myth, but likewise suffering cannot extinguish the human arcing toward encoding our hearts and minds via the social/psychological technology of art. That whips ass.
– Langdon Hickman
[ad_2]
Original Source Link