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.
The balance of covering more mainstream material again has renewed my love of the sonic underground. If you can believe it, you can in fact endure ear fatigue listening to roughly five to ten new underground metal records a week every single week for years on end. Riffs blur together, music of similar scales and chord motions start to become indistinguishable, and even the avant-garde shock you used to rely upon to keep yourself rooted in your body begins to lose its power. Being forced to really be present for mainstream material so that I might cover it seriously and with respect has been a wonderful shock to my system, like a cold plunge after a good pump at the gym. I can feel in my bones an understanding of what passes for normal again, be it production, songwriting, or sonic aesthetic, as well as an appreciation for why those decision or directions are pursued.
This in turn makes the delightfully bizarre world of the underground have a renewed perverse thrill again. Perversity is a necessary component of this music and of avant-garde or transgressive art in general. (The avant-garde being a transgress of aesthetics, after all.) We too often collapse perversity to a sexual space, but the broader sense of moving against expectation, sometimes violently so, with great and reckless wildness and spirit, is what generated rock, punk and heavy metal in the first place, as well as blues, jazz, hip-hop, and the perpetual avant-garde edge of electronic music. We have to remember that so much of what we take for granted now was once itself considered unlistenable provocateurism, from the now de rigueur industrial tonalities in everything from pop to hip-hop to contemporary rock.
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This is what differentiates a conservative versus adventurous taste in music. One seeks comfort primarily, finding it most often in sounds that already exist and modes that already please. The latter strikes out into the unknown in pursuit of the strange not just for its own sake but also to imagine what if this too became normal. It isn’t just the witness of the bizarre that’s appealing but the desire, which can often carry through into social and political spaces of a life, to see these rarities become accepted and allowed. The ideal, of course, is to hold both. A pure subscription to comfort listening blocks out anything new, but a pure subscription to the avant-garde can lead to abandoning any good idea for whatever the next thing is that comes along. Art across time is a pan-generational, pan-cultural project of humanity to unearth and explore how aesthetic, emotion, memory and experience can blur and become one. The avant-garde are the paintmakers, mixing new colors, some useless, some beautiful, and some necessary albeit perhaps only for one painting.
– Langdon Hickman