Heavy as in Full of Sorrow
Origins
The other day a friend of mine sent me the album Death Folk Country by Dorthia Cottrell, the singer from the Richmond, VA doom band Windhand. Where Windhand is reliably loud and slow, Death Folk Country is spacious and thin, resembling Appalachian hymns, beautiful but intensely creepy a cappella. And it has me thinking about how I arrived at heavier music--heavy in lyrical content, heavy in composition.
My dad is a high school teacher. He has an extended vacation every summer, and when I was in high school he and I would paint the buildings and faculty homes on the boarding school campus where he worked and my family lived. We would buy new blues compilations on CD before each painting season that we would listen to in a silver boombox bought at CVS that would be plugged into a 50ft extension cord so we could carry it along with the ladder and paint tray as we moved down walls.
Many of these compilations started with what you could call accessible blues music, classics like Muddy Waters and BB King. But then we started getting into the Mississippi Hill Country artists. Somehow we got an R.L. Burnside album, and maybe a Junior Kimbrough one, and we both became obsessed with the Hill Country style. Blues is generally repetitive, but Hill Country blues is almost droning and brutal, the lyrics uniquely violent, the music sometimes atonal but always within this context of a hypnotic vamp.
I always had an assumption that it was Mastodon that led me into heavier music, especially that coming out of the South in sub-genre epicenters like Savannah and New Orleans.
At some point in high school I saw the quasi-documentary Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus at Real Artways in Hartford, CT, a theater and art space I am completely in debt to for a lot of early aesthetic influences. The movie is really weird. The musician Jim White is the narrator / protagonist, and it's really just a profile of a part of the south nowhere near interstate exits. Footage of snake charming, cramped prison life, local barber shops, Harry Crews telling creepy stories about how his grandmother told him to bury the carcass of the opossum they ate with its eyes pointed into the earth so it wouldn't dig out of the hole and find them when it rose again. It's a crazy movie, and the soundtrack was defining for me.
If level of saturation (distortion) on the guitars is the metric of heaviness, or how much singers yell, then the soundtrack isn't that. But it is absolutely of a considerably psychological weight. The cover of Geeshie Wiley's "Last Kind Words" by The New York Dolls' David Johansen is without happiness. The off-kilter duet "First There Was" by Johnny Dowd and Maggie Brown, performed live in a rural hair salon, is equal parts beautiful (Brown's choruses), and desperately drunken (Dowd's verses).
Heavy music sometimes has very little to do with the actual volume or production and more to do with what kind of psychological vibe it communicates.
Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska and Ghost of Tom Joad albums are not "heavy", both being almost completely acoustic, but their weight is larger than a lot of modern deathcore. If you are not emotionally crippled by "Highway Patrolman" then I'm suspicious of your empathic competencies.
Or think about Ethel Cain as a modern artist that musically resembles a lot of vocal-affected performers like Carolyn Polachek or Charli XCX, but as far as mood goes probably relates more to the old Mississippi hill country stuff.
Jack the car and let it ride
Kicking it, baby, we'll survive
I'm all run and you're all fight
Tangling with Jesus Christ
Total ruin idolized
Heavy doesn't always mean loud and distorted and chuggy. Heavy may mean lonely, or sorrowful, even if the music surrounding the lyrical content is ebullient.
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
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