Mining Metal: Belore, Givre, Glassing, Hekseblad, La Torture Des Ténèbres, Love Sex Machine, Nuclear Tomb, and Tomb Portal
The post Mining Metal: Belore, Givre, Glassing, Hekseblad, La Torture Des Ténèbres, Love Sex Machine, Nuclear Tomb, and Tomb Portal appeared first on Consequence.
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.
As of this writing, I am getting married in just over a week; I wake up nearly every morning into a throttling panic attack, like a safe was laid directly on my guilt chest, pressing me clean of air. These facts are, as far as I can tell, unrelated. There is a brutishness to life, not so much a randomness, which would imply a blunt and opaque acausality, but instead something substantially more opaque, a causal web of contingency and relation that exponentiates beyond comprehension so that, when we catch glinting glimmers of it in our days and lives, it feels random, devoid of meaning or important.
If I had to thread a simple line through these two fact-sensations, it would be that: On the precipice of marriage at 35, I have become more reflective of a life that had for a long period been lived sincerely with an understanding that I might die. You lose friends sometimes, often to idiot causes, the bleakly inhumane way addicts and the undercarriage of society are scraped clean from the wheels of the world. I am not enmeshed in those machines anymore, or at least not on those levels, but there is ever a lingering terror, a carpe diemic impulse. Days, by their nature, are numbered. This is mere fact.
But I have always been reflective. It is a curse of both my general manner as well as, I’ve learned in adulthood, an artifact of autism. Not to say that those not on the spectrum don’t have rich inner worlds (that would be insane!), but more that life where any outward projection feels suffocated by sheets of meaningless distorting noise (god I wonder why I grew to like extreme metal and jazz) necessitates at some point that that same energy turn inward. I brood; I roil in my juices. It is my way, learned from my father who learned it from his father, on and on. So such a brutish tie between these two juxtapositional fact-sensations feels inaccurate or, worse, something I loathe greatly: an oversimplification meant for expediency but replacing a real insight as to the connection between things.
And anyway, this is assuaged by the genuine and deep peace I feel with my soon-to-be spouse. We’ve been together for eight years, twice as long as my longest lasting relationship before this. I feel a patience and acceptance but also a challenge and motivation naturally effervescing from them that I struggle to feel I deserve but that they give freely and without hesitation. They are my rock. I talked a big game against the misogynistic roots of both traditional Western monogamy and the artificial construction of marriage and while certain aspects of those critiques still bear out in how me and my partner comport our lives, the desire to marry came as natural as: I love you. I am better with you and for you. Be with me. Peace of this profundity is eerie in how logic-bending and concrete it seems. At times, the only solid thing in the world. This is perhaps the second thing I’ve ever been truly certain of, after only my desire to write.
– Langdon Hickman
Belore – Eastern Tales
Reading Dayal Patterson’s Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult has reaffirmed that black metal is a tool to push how far one’s tastes can stretch, how much one can stomach, and how much (or little) musical aptitude one needs to create good music rather than obsessing over Satan and Scandinavia. It hungers for heaviness and possesses the confidence to test ideas that will never be cool or in vogue and, thus, passed over by most other acts. France’s Belore and their latest LP Eastern Tales personify that mindset. Even if their epic folky black metal isn’t shattering any Petri dishes with its new developments, it provides a feeling of wonder, joy, and curiosity totally foreign to anger or aggression, yet does so through metal’s lingua franca. Fantastical synths and keyboards set the medieval scene as guitars lay in wait. The album is far removed from black metal’s original sound but innately tied to metal’s otherworldliness. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Givre – Le Cloître
Praise due to whoever gave Givre a larger budget. The group’s 2022 album Le Pressoir Mystique was interesting but the shoddy production held it back. By contrast, Le Cloître sounds as if it was released 100 years later and it’s all the better for it. Everything is as affecting as it’s meant to be, whether that’s the harrowing black metal of “Louise du Néant (1639-1694)” or the solitary post-metal found in “Sainte Hildegarde de Bingen (1098-1179).” The improved production may turn off lo-fi diehards but it reduces an emotional barrier between object and subject and, as such, Givre can better represent their material. None of this is light listening, by the way. Le Cloître recounts the suffering of six saint women throughout history, never shying away from how much their religious devotion harmed them. For every instant that it’s not blood-curdling, it’s isolating and (this is a compliment) uncomfortable. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Glassing – From the Other Side of the Mirror
When I spoke with Glassing’s vocalist and bassist Dustin Coffman a few months ago, he revealed that he actively tries to dodge genre classification and, if he could, release an album with nothing but a drumbeat just to disappoint people. His mentality grinds up against guitarist Cory Brim’s aim to please audiences and gargantuan riffs. The tension between their preferences has always been central to Glassing but the scales have tipped in Brim’s favor with From the Other Side of the Mirror. It’s the group’s catchiest release with bowling-ball thick guitars and few ambient passages. That being said, they still straddle genres as if they’re taunting you to pin them down. “Circle Down” is USBM, “Nominal Will” is post-hardcore, and “As My Heart Rots” is screamo. Or are they? The treat with any Glassing release is that they actively dodge genres so well that you’re forced to accept them on their terms, and those terms are electrifying. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Hekseblad – Kaer Mohren
Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher is such a suitable fit for black metal that it could have overtaken Tolkein’s lasting influence had it come out sooner. It certainly seems more relevant thematically, with Lord of the Rings focusing on mythology, rucking, and setting up camp to eat with your friends while The Witcher is about isolation, apathy, and how we define humanity. Hekseblad, the two-person black metal group, recognizes that on their debut Kaer Mohren and deliver ten tracks indebted to the source material. It’s dark and evil but in a Nosferatu-flickering-the-lights-on-and-off type of way. The thrill overtakes the content, which is something that occasionally gets tossed by the wayside when delving into evil second-wave worship. Hekseblad is a bit like Immortal in that sense — still true to the cult, but just plain fun to listen to. It’s black metal to show your dad. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
La Torture Des Ténèbres – V
I have a rule: If a record makes me cry or otherwise have a massive break emotionally, it gets written about regardless of what I may think I want to talk about more. In music and in criticism, sincerity matters, and learning not to second guess the body when it tells you you love a record, be it uncontrollably dancing to electronica or uncontrollably singing along to a pop song or, here, uncontrollably getting shaky and emotional during a noise/black metal release, it’s important to always be honest. It’s everything about this for me: not just the cover of this album, but all the albums of this project, which project the disturbing and inhuman image of cities in black and white, like a cruel intensification of Imperial Triumphant’s project. This is the Begotten to that band’s Barry Lyndon, both filtered through the impossible inhumanity of Metropolis sans even a shred of hope. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Love Sex Machine – Trve
I’ve loved this band since discovering them over a decade ago with their debut. A brutish and ugly form of post-metal, like if Neurosis and Eyehategod were to be fused in a car accident. The riffs and vocals spit venom. Black metal never struck as deeply, corrosively nihilistic as music like this, which feels like how losing your friends to fentanyl feels, feels like what watching them struggle against cycles of addiction and overzealous police action feels like, feels like what waking up to a text or a call about something horrible they’ve done that they can’t take back feels like. A great deal of human judgment comes from either having too great a distance from this kind of heartbreak or learning to harden yourself in the face of it, to no longer see the writhing, striving, failing human inside but just the scar tissue of bad actions. This music is acid that cuts through nerveless tissue, back to the blood. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Nuclear Tomb – Terror Labyrinthian
Like Voivod battling with old Pestilence on heaving living mountain of cybernetic meat. It isn’t quite prog, isn’t quite death metal, isn’t quite thrash, feeling less like a fusion of elements as much as something attempting to strike at the breaking ridge between styles, much the way Sadus at their peak challenged us to consider that same ridgeline of aesthetics. This does the most important thing thrash can do, which is to feel frantic, like it’s on the verge of breaking apart at a moment’s notice, vaporizing on re-entry. The joy I had learning and playing this stuff as a teen who struggled to express themselves in human language and social mores was the way you could convey the mind-chew of anxiety shredding your brain into terrified sound, like you were running from wild animals. That bleak energy is carried on here. Thrilling stuff. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Tomb Portal – Enthanatogen
Life is nasty, brutish and short. Death metal can be many things: stellar voyages, the opening eye, a spiritual eruption. This is meet and mud. We get so much tedious writing and flippant social media posts about death metal going mainstream or old school sonic ideas losing their heft. Press play on this record and tell me you don’t feel like you did the first time you heard Incantation or Immolation or Morbid Angel. I’ve reached the point in adulthood where it’s become hard to cry again: one of those things, the hardening of arteries. Death metal like this feels like an outpouring of emotion unfiltered by intellect. Just ugly, ugly retching. God how I love it. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
Mining Metal: Belore, Givre, Glassing, Hekseblad, La Torture Des Ténèbres, Love Sex Machine, Nuclear Tomb, and Tomb Portal
Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey
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