Mining Metal: Acausal Intrusion, Barrow Lord, Cartilage, Fluisteraars, Miscreance, Pakosteň, Sněť, unknindness

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. One of the key drivers, I think, of proper extreme metal is conjuring precisely that blood-soaked and deranged psychedelia of the posters in the bedrooms of miscreants in the ’80s you’d see in certain slashers or cautionary films and TV shows. There was a certain sulfurous reek of evil to those images, like a head dripping blood or psychotic discontiguated human bodies arranged in a shocking Satanic tableau. It is an image-sense that is by its nature avant-garde because of how far it skews from both good taste and commonality, like an eruptive intrusion into the real by some outside force wielding black daggers and antlered at strange angels, crooked little demons of mud and bone and belching black smoke and torrents of vomit. This is disjunct, obviously, from the real evils of the world. We are in an era where political consciousness seems as easy to gain as to lose, where nothing is apolitical a...