Mining Metal: Asystole, Bonginator, Bonjour Tristesse, Dødheimsgard, Lunar Chamber, SARMAT, VoidCeremony, and Welkin
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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.
The symbolism of life and its richness is a perpetual strangeness. I ended last year by busting my arm and giving myself an ugly hematoma. This year has been marked by intense social disruption, the collapse of friend groups, the transfer of ownership of my day job and all those requisite anxieties. I’ve finished a novel I’d put on hold for nearly four years and the gap where that novel once occupied space within my mind throbs like a tumor of emptiness. It’s cliché obviously to say that you can’t really anticipate the curves of life, that whole adage of “man plans, god laughs,” but perhaps the most comical part of aging for me has been how true seeming clichés like that have wound up becoming. The lay misanthropy that motivates a lot of black metal fractures, disintegrates, but its pieces remain, complicated by love and frustration, alloying themselves into shapes substantially more confusing and flexed than the static miserablist things we might have fixated on as young metalheads.
I once told a therapist that I was an ardent metalhead, listening all over the genre (as many of us do!) but having particular fondness for death metal. There was a look of palpable shock on my therapist’s face; after all, I was there for severe depression after a remarkably dark set of events that could only ever have terminated in therapy or death, a statement of life that sadly quite a lot of us can relate to, as painfully common if often unspoken that it is. But, and I believe you can anticipate where I’m going with this, I had to somewhat forcefully tell my therapist that, no, death metal in specific and heavy metal in general isn’t really music of anger and pain. Yeah, it sounds that way to people, and there’s an undeniable aspect of getting amped and stuff like that, but the abiding sensation for me is one of intense joy. The integration of eastern religious and philosophical images we see all over extreme metal may often land somewhere between cringe and appropriative, real problems of aesthetics and spirit, but the motivation is painfully sincere. There’s an ardent serenity here.
I compare, for instance, how my heart feels whenever Metallica returns. The quality of their records at this stage in their career I would sincerely argue is a cut above how they’re often reported, but that misses the point: they’re METALLICA, the band that made Ride the Lightning, the greatest record of all-time, the band that got me into heavy metal, burst wide that door to this place of perennial peace for me. Likewise we have a band like Smoulder, who we didn’t have space to cover this month but are absolutely worth your time, who seemingly effortlessly conjure the reverbed and oil painted vistas of fantasy that covered the beat-up used and yellowed pulp novels of my youth. That metal can span those spaces to the modernist and avant-garde literary realms that occupy much of my adulthood, that it can weave through the complex and shifting symbols that mark the unanticipated trials of my years, is a perennial blessing.
It’s perhaps childish, yes, but I love heavy metal. I love it the way dogs love people. I can frame it cerebrally, poetically, bluntly, exuberantly, but at its heart it’s a child’s love.
— Langdon Hickman,
Contributing Writer
Asystole – Siren to Blight
This past year has been one of deep defeat and confusion for me, a series of bad decisions and their repercussions coming home to roost, scattering my sense of solidity and firm futurity. As I sit, Benedryl for the allergies and caffeine for the proper functioning of my brain filtering through my blood, my head a woozy smokestain against the walls and ceiling of my study, this album feels how I feel. The bizarre labyrinth of these riffs, the way melodies slink up and down diminished and augmented passages, hanging just outside of the reach of consonance, becomes a mirror not of my past nor my destination but the sense of being lost which suffuses my present. Music, be it extreme or not, is evocation, a way of mapping the limits of the head and the heart, the imagination and the sensorium. Asystole’s debut is a map via prog, death and black metal, my favorite of all elements, of my present condition. It feels like home. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Langdon Hickman
Bonginator – The Intergalactic Gorebong of Deathpot
Bonginator’s debut album is dumb, littered with extended poop jokes and LMFAO references, but you already knew that by its title. There are no pretenses to Bonginator or what they’re doing, rather, they’re a send-up to death metal’s enduring qualities. The Intergalactic Gorebong of Deathpot has a timeless appeal as it pulls from Cannibal Corpse like a buzzard pulling organs out of a carcass. It’s a proof-of-concept album about death metal that’s equally hilarious thanks in no small part to Erik Thorstenn’s charisma. His humor is juvenile, repulsive, repetitive, and ridiculous, but he’s committed to each joke and delivers them with surprising clarity. As such, you hear him perfectly when he cries, “You underestimated / My weed and now you are dead / All other weed fucking sucks / Dead from the smoke, get fucked.” Buy it on Bandcamp. — Colin Dempsey
Bonjour Tristesse – Your Ultimate Urban Nightmare
The funny thing about black metal is that all its thorniest qualities — its nihilism, bleakness, and disdain for the world — are transferable to anarchism and societal critiques. Bonjour Tristesse’s second album Your Ultimate Urban Nightmare adopts these principles to convey how it feels to move through the capitalist world. As the title indicates, Your Ultimate Urban Nightmare is as subtle as a brick through a shop window, employing DSBM swaths on “Alienation” and while “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City” is a lonely piano interlude. Since he’s a black metal musician, Bonjour Tristesse is a tad overdramatic, but that grants him a human presence that transforms Your Ultimate Urban Nightmare from a document simply decrying capitalism into an accurate portrayal of the solitude and frustration the systems imposes on individuals. It’s grim and joyless, but it reaffirms that no one is alone in how they feel. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Colin Dempsey
Dødheimsgard – Black Medium Current
We could describe this as a return to the euphoric black metal of their early years, pushing past the return to black metal shown on 2015’s masterful A Umbra Omega without sacrificing the vast progressive imagistic allure of their later years. This, however, would miss the point. Black metal at its best is spiritual music, conjuring magic through a full-throated commitment to the inherent theatricality of its aesthetic and artifice, inheriting that trait from progressive rock, another genre that falls apart if you don’t commit 1000% to the premise. DHG here do not feel Satanic as much as reveling in the contradictory permanent impermanence of the stars, of black holes rendered to great iron spheres, a hyperextension of spiritual frameworks to the mathematical limits of those many infinities. This album is vast, lush, romantic, bursting with grief and, most notably, love, grief’s necessary complement. Eight year waits, de rigueur for this group, are nothing when the results are always this powerful. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Langdon Hickman
Lunar Chamber – Shambhallic Vibrations
I suppose you can tell if you have a definable brand by how fervently people DM, text and email you all to recommend the exact same album. Well, it turns out they’re all right; Lunar Chamber’s debut scratches just about every itch I have, from lyrics that engage with my often private and intense spiritual questions to music that draws as handily from progressive and New Age sources as the progressive, technical and brutal worlds of death metal. This is a relatively short record, with just under 20 minutes of proper songs if you exclude the intro and interlude, but it works better to imagine it as one solid 30-minute composition, shifting and shimmering across the colors of the spectrum. As an appetite whetting morself, it’s more than satisfactory; much like the Blood Incantation and Cryptic Shift demos of recent memory, I am now eagerly anticipating a macro-sized portion of what these folk have to offer. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Langdon Hickman
SARMAT – Dubious Disk
Dubious Disk is only a teaser of what’s to come on SARMAT’s Determined to Strike, as the 17-minute improvisational track merely plays upon musical motifs the yet-to-be-released album will expand on. That doesn’t matter though, because Dubious Disk is simultaneously April’s best progressive metal album and its best jazz fusion album. That much would be obvious from SARMAT’s roster, which is an Olympic gold medal-caliber collection of New York metal musicians assembled in Colin Marston’s Menegroth The Thousand Caves studio. If none of that matters to you, here’s what should — Dubious Disk is 17 minutes of instruments hopping in bed with one another and reenacting Gilbert Godfried’s “The Aristocrats” joke. The segments range from free jazz to progressive black metal to post-bop, tethered by an excitement that permeates the music and morphs what should be a self-indulgent band practice into novel metal expressionism. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Colin Dempsey
VoidCeremony – Threads of Unknowing
Oh the profundity of my delight! Phil Tougas, extraordinary virtuoso shred guitarist who’s been punching up records by everyone from Atramentus to Worm to First Fragment, joins the ensemble here. What comes is, much like the Worm mini-LP from earlier this year, an increased dosage of melodic black metal in their otherwise jazz fusion-heavy approach to tech death, not to mention a fine helping of symphonic synths for atmosphere. A few of these solos manage to match the heights of Death at their mightiest, that sterling period from Human to Symbolic, while calling to mind the song structures of the more esoteric and mystical wings of tech and prog death. It feels in turn like Dream Theater, Emperor, The Chasm, and Dissection, which is to say it is one of the very best records of its style I’ve heard in some time. The incredible promise of their debut has been realized. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Langdon Hickman
Welkin – 武勇 / Emblems of Valour
East Asian black metal albums like Vengeful Spectre’s 2020 self-titled and Black Kirin’s 哀郢 (National Trauma) offer a different interpretation of black metal’s fascination with war, often pairing Oriental folk with zany compositions. Singapore’s Welkin play a more traditional style of black metal than the aforementioned groups, but they possess the same spirit. Their sophomore LP 武勇 / Emblems of Valour pantomimes a battlefield with lengthy tracks, minimal variation, and a never-say-die pace. Yet, Hasthur’s toothy vocals and the spacious mixing tease grandeur, as if each battle during 武勇 / Emblems of Valour represents a larger ideology than itself. It’s black metal about war, yes, and to deny how well Welkin performs that would be a mistake, but there’s an electric jolt coursing underneath the album implying its reverence for the heroes from the “Oath of the Peach Garden,” a pivotal scene in “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” is more than just hero worship. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Colin Dempsey
Mining Metal: Asystole, Bonginator, Bonjour Tristesse, Dødheimsgard, Lunar Chamber, SARMAT, VoidCeremony, and Welkin
Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey
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