Mining Metal: Anti-God Hand, Ars Moriendi, Colony Drop, Dead Neanderthals, Dymna Lotva, Mohini Dey, Nox Eternus, and Trhä
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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.
Heavy metal is not a financially lucrative venture, especially in the extreme realms. That’s evident to anyone who’s listened to, well, any metal at all. The Sisyphean drive to screech into a microphone in a basement recording studio, decelerate your riffs to a glacial pace, or whatever other musical vice you have is best summarized in a tweet by Pyrrhon’s bassist Erik Malave, which read, “True anti capitalist action is spending countless years and funds devoted to a niche craft with negligible monetary value. I love it and will never stop.” Yet, the trade-off for the lack of commercial viability is more than worthwhile, for some.
The more extreme the metal, the freer human expression becomes, with the caveat that it loses accessibility. You can interpret this in one of two ways: the literal sense of accessible, which is no doubt true, considering there are only so many labels out there capable of fully supporting metal bands, and some of them are tinged with less-than-savory optics. The other interpretation is that human expression is less permeable to the listener in extreme forms. It becomes less universal and more solitary. This isn’t a good or bad quality, it’s just an aspect. Few turn to metal for its lyrical insights alone (though high-quality metal lyrics aren’t as rare as purported), and the overwhelming sound is imbued to the creator rather than the audience. Metal isn’t about relating or understanding, it’s about finding yourself in another being’s perception.
This dive into selfish self-expression and improvement is fruitless by all capital means. Most metal musicians I know work full-time jobs and play in multiple bands. I’d like to write that they make ends meet, but that’s becoming an exception rather than a rule. The corporate wheel that champions work ethic rolls onwards, but the esoteric, engorged, and eldritch beckons, drawing the finger to stoke the flames of devices that cannot be controlled by market forces. As time moves onwards, metal increasingly becomes a vessel artists manipulate to engage with themselves. The fruits of their labor allow us to engage with ourselves through the most vile methods.
This neatly brings us to the eight releases from this past month. August overflowed with quality albums, all of which in their own sense represent metal’s death drive, absconding conventional tastes in favor of long, isolated nights spent with whatever tools were on hand — be they a guitar or programmed drums — howling what was never to be deciphered for no one other than the creator.
— Colin Dempsey
Anti-God Hand – Blight Year
Black metal as an agent of hope is no longer as renegade as it once was, but what’s interesting is that this route is largely taken by bands who pair its incendiary nature with other emotionally grave genres. Case in point — the Vancouver act Anti-God Hand, who quite literally rose from the ashes of wildfires with a black-metal-meets-screamo hybrid. Blight Year is as gleefully chaotic as its concoction implies, glistening and slicing with equal measure. It’s blistering, but with a joyous undertone. Anti-God Hand revel in their survival, dancing and showboating when the mood strikes (i.e., the solo on “Demon Sniper). What’s more, Colin Marston applied the perfect coat of mixing and mastering that summons forth Blight Year’s most caustic elements, which are also the most ecstatic, a detail that’s vital for the album’s superb quality. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Ars Moriendi – Lorsque les coeurs s’assèchent
It’s a shame that Ars Moriendi has yet to connect with as many people as they should, though their impenetrable status is just as likely to deter as many as it’d attract. To those unaware, they’re a one-man French progressive black metal band headed by The Arsonist that incorporates jazz, trip-hop, and ambient with historical interests and heavy doses of philosophy, asking questions such as “How does one become evil,” through the lens of a Chevalier de la Barre, who was was sentenced to death in France in 1766 for blasphemy. In short, they’re unwieldy. In addition, The Arsonist’s gravely vocal delivery and penchant for epic tapestries are love or hate affairs, not because they’re repulsive, but because they command respect. You have to buy into Ars Moriendi’s immersive experience. As such, Lorsque les coeurs s’assèchent isn’t an album that can be summarized with a musical passage or an evoked feeling; it’s the purest passion project in metal today, one so uncommercial and niche that it commands respect. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Demspey
Colony Drop – Brace for Impact
Blatant nepotism? Maybe! The debut record by our own dearly departed O.G. “Mining Metal” writer Joseph Schafer (he’s not dead! just in a band!) and company is a tasty slice of hardcore-driven thrash — and has a great deal more rip and tear than some of the cleaner or more party-driven bands the subgenre has seen for the past two decades or so. If you go back and reread any of our oldest columns, you’ll get a good sense of the stuff going on here; a volatile mix of punk, prog, heavy metal and just enough anime references and Maiden-style harmonized guitar licks to keep things from settling too much into one particular lane. I normally make a habit not to cover the work of friends, for obvious ethical reasons, but given Joe’s position here with us plus a promise that I wouldn’t cover the record unless I sincerely liked it, this one-off rub to our boy felt not only acceptable but well-earned on his part. If you ever wonder why he left the column, well, now you know! Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Dead Neanderthals – Specters
This collective has a direct line to my heart for any new record they release in their various guises. Here, the formerly-jazz duo Dead Neanderthals instead deliver a tense and meditative set across two tracks bridging the gap between the doomy meditations of Ash Borer with the psychedelic trance states of modern day Oranssi Pazuzu. The inclusion of Scott Hedrick, guitarist of Skeletonwitch, certainly helps push the record into those melody-dappled doomed black metal spaces, but he in turn plays sensitively against the roiling engine of the original duo. There is time for records to rage to, but there’s a sublime beauty to music like this, which feels resolutely and sincerely holy, devout hymnals, which wordlessly scrape the tops of the domes of the cathedral of the world. Hopefully this trio format continues on yet! Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Dymna Lotva – Зямля Пад Чорнымі Крыламі: Кроў (The Land Under The Black Wings: Blood)
Metal’s war fetishization more often than not feeds into a masochistic drive to conquer, which is not to discredit it when the results include Bathory’s discography, but there’s a missing individual tragedy that Dymna Lotva’s third album latches onto. The Belarusian group’s own lore, of forcibly fleeing their home country for fear of political violence only to then flee Ukraine after the onset of the war, elevates the subject matter until it’s distressing. The Land Under The Black Wings: Blood is ashy and desolate, dour and plodding, moving not with the urgency of a midnight raid on the enemy but of a wounded population limping out of an invasion. Rather than blaze through triumphs, Dymna Lotva take their time and force you to witness what war has done and how it will never change. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Mohini Dey – Mohini Dey
While I don’t know if I’d strictly call this a metal record, I do know that this is our column and so what we say goes. Jokes aside, this record has more than enough metal chops and riffs over it to feel like the outer limit, approaching from the jazz side, of precisely the kind of work noted greats like Watchtower, Canvas Solaris, ATVM or especially Gordian Knot do and did. While extreme records may be incredible, there’s very little that stokes my heart quite like the hybrid animal/cerebral intensity of compositions and playing like this. Anyone who’s picked up an instrument can attest: little compares to absolutely cutting loose, burning with all virtuosity, and having the reward be beauty and thrill rather than aimlessness. Lowkey, this is one of the very best records of the year. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Nox Eternus – Eternal Night
Metal has a primordial spirit that not’s encapsulated in just the riffs, the atmosphere, the rawness, or the vocals — it’s how they coalesce into a form that could only exist in metal. Eternal Night possesses that spirit. It’s a gnawing entity that’s untouched by any influences outside of metal. It’s primitive in that its components (black, death, and thrash) in their representation here haven’t aged since the ’80s, capturing their original spirits with simplicity and energy. Nox Eternus are scrappy and lo-fi, but those elements serve the amorphous metal soul, rejecting any possible beauty that could’ve come with a clearer production. The almost transparent sound design places all the focus on Nox Eternus and their commune with the genre’s cultural identity, sounding ambivalent to the world’s whims rather than outright evil. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Trhä – §ºanΩë aglivajsamë cá nëlh¶iha i eddana pi¶e
I was pawing over a couple albums to potentially cover and saw that there was once more new Trhä. Having covered his project before, I was hopeful to give the slot to another artist, but this record left me weeping quietly at my desk, peeling back the often cliched and tedious elements of raw black metal to reveal a heartbroken and yearning emotionalist core. I am, if you haven’t noticed, an emotionally charged person; I’m not interested in a coldness of being, a politeness or rationality. This was a lance to the heart, an arrow from the dark. How could I in good conscience not include a record so effortlessly forlorn in a way so much black metal strives but fails to be? This is also, I might add, what I mean by good production, which is neither a statement of how high or low the fidelity is but how much it benefits the project. This is perfect. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Mining Metal: Anti-God Hand, Ars Moriendi, Colony Drop, Dead Neanderthals, Dymna Lotva, Mohini Dey, Nox Eternus, and Trhä
Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey
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