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.
If you wait long enough, everything changes. Neurosis are one of the most important bands of my life and through them I can trace a radical sea change in my taste I endured in the perennial quest to discover who I am. I had heard the name but, living in a semi-rural part of Virginia, hadn’t seen their albums; their existence was for me something I would see in interviews, magazines and message boards, a hushed sense of apocalyptic wonder, carried next to names like Swans and Current 93, but whose music I never could find. I wound up falling madly in love with the bands that came as a direct result of their influence (and Godflesh’s, to be fair to that other legendary project), groups like Pelican, Cult of Luna and especially Isis. It was in the latter that I found the perfect hybrid of hardcore, heavy metal and progressive music I’d been hunting for my entire life as a metal and prog loving kid in an otherwise hardcore-soaked town exactly halfway between the twin hardcore capitals of Richmond and DC.
Then, one day, it appeared. Their record Given to the Rising had just come out and a single copy was staring back at me from the racks. You have to understand, I was an obsessive. (That’s how I can do a job like this.) I would go to the record store every single release week and would spend quite literally as much money as I had on me, be it 20 or 200 dollars. Every single one of those albums would be listened to by me in that following week, with me taking reams of notes about the group, the band, the songs, which somehow didn’t get me flagged as autistic at least directly to me until adulthood, somehow. So it was not a shock that I came to find it the second it came to the store. The shock was that it came at all. But with its severe blacks and the austere statue of a horse on the cover, held in a position that reminded me of Agalloch’s The Mantle, I snatched it immediately. And through that music, I endured great change.
I will spare you the emotional details for now, but anyone sufficiently in love with Neurosis will be able to fill in those gaps for themselves already. There is an alchemical force to their music, an atomic-level breakdown of the shells around the self that take you to the meditative core of your own personhood. You sit there, naked and alone, gazing at your own face, the fire and air inside you, and you can begin to name those things that you see. The key album for me is A Sun That Never Sets. Everyone has a Neurosis record that for them is the record and it always comes with a story like this.
When they disappeared, I thought genuinely they would never return. That is a group that can’t just swap members as some groups can. There is, again, a balanced alchemy. It is a magical force that deserves respect. That their surprise return showcased Aaron Turner, literally the only person who could do the job, made me so happy I burst into tears at my desk.
I am so happy. We can endure hardship and confusion, thoughts of self-annihilation and hopelessness, but given enough time, everything changes, either for the better or the worse, but always changes.
– Langdon Hickman
