Liturgy:Aesthethica

7.8/10 dropps
Thrill Jockey; 2011

What do you think of when you hear black metal? Corpse paint. Blast beats. Medieval armor. Album covers of dead lead singers. Satanic imagery. Norway?

Black metal is nothing new. Most fans believe it started in the early 80’s with a little band called Venom (they actually coined the genre with their second album, “Black Metal”). And since then it has become closely associated with shocking imagery, violent showmanship, and a relentless desire to produce music as poorly as possible. Then there comes Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the leading man of Liturgy, a Brooklyn-based black metal group who does not wear corpse paint, does not wear costumes or armor, and does not inundate you with Satanic or pagan lyrics. Instead, they’re clad in jeans and T-shirts, and the cover of their newest album, Aesthethica, shows two crosses, one upside down and the other right-side up—perhaps as a balancing of traditional black-metal cornerstones.

It’s true that Liturgy breaks many stereotypes of black metal, and they get a lot of flak for it. Most metal fans write off Liturgy from the moment they see them, pinning names on them like “hipster,” “pretentious,” and just plain NOT black metal. But that’s where many people’s arguments get stuck when it comes to this band. “They just don’t feel or sound like black metal” is the usual response. It’s as if there’s something missing or wrong. But the reality is that it’s perfectly fine; it’s just very different. For example, Hunt-Hendrix told the online music publication Metal Sucks in an interview that he doesn’t perform blast beats, but he performs burst beats, which are really just blast beats that fade in and out without actually staying at a steady tempo or volume. In the interview he explained that burst beats are like “water [going] from ice to liquid to gas, or a horse [going] from walk to trot to canter.” This type of quote is exactly why traditional black metal fans probably won’t take too happily or too easily to this band.

Hunt-Hendrix is a musician who says that black metal is a “space for honoring heritage and tradition, and also for the obliteration of all culture.” He says that black metal’s purpose is to reach a “perfect void,” and that aligns well with his idea of the burst beat. Aesthethica’s sound fiercely beats on your senses like most metal does, but then it pulls back and throws you a curve you didn’t expect, such as on “Helix Skull” with an 8-bit sounding keyboard playing in the background for two and a half minutes until it flies headfirst into “Glory Bronze” with a quick kick of feedback and a much more traditional sounding blast beat. Then there’s “Generations” which thunders on with a single power chord, rather than tremolo picking, for an entire seven minutes. Liturgy is repetitive and—at times—relentless.

There are also Hunt-Hendrix’s vocals, which are completely unintelligible. Most black metal is traditionally indistinguishable, even from itself. One chord blends into the next just like one word of the lyrics blends into the others. This is especially true for Liturgy. Hunt-Hendrix wails as if he’s truly in pain. It’s not so much aggression as it is loss and desperation. This accentuates the point that Liturgy is different from other black metal bands. They often refer to one God rather than pagan gods. This isn’t to say that the band is Christian; they just feel that attacking Christianity has almost become cliché. They acknowledge the spirituality of black metal as Hunt-Hendrix sings, “As the blood of God / Bursts the veins of time / Give your avatar a kiss / An abyss spits out an abyss.”

Before Liturgy finishes Asthethica in a more traditional form, there is a three-minute-thirty-second chant of a song called “Glass Earth.” It sounds like it would have fit much better on an Animal Collective album, but Hunt-Hendrix defends it when he says in his interview, “we find chants as early as A Blaze in the Northern Sky, so it’s nothing new.” The chant continues to add more and more voices until it crescendos into a visceral overload: wailing, tremolo picking, shrieking riffs, and consistent blast—excuse me—burst beats.

Liturgy is definitely a band that hasn’t (and maybe won’t ever) be received well from its traditional niche of fans. If you’ve seen or read an interview with the band or heard about the “Transcendental Black Metal” manifesto that Hunt-Hendix wrote, then you might realize how pretentious their philosophy of the band is. But that doesn’t make Aesthethica bad. In fact, this album has just the right amount of variation, innovation and surprises from one track to that next, that it’s really hard to not listen to it from beginning to end to get the full scope of the experience. There are moments on this album that sound so brilliant by themselves that it’s hard to believe this is only their second release.

Most black metal fans are simply set in their ways, though, and they’re probably not willing to accept the change that Liturgy has brought or indulge in anything that isn’t “trve” black metal, as if it’s some sort of gang war. But regardless of personal taste, it would be a grave mistake to say that this band is an attack on the genre itself. Euronymous, a former guitarist for a famous black metal band called Mayhem, once said in a 1992 interview, “People are supposed to hate us. After all, we never meant to form a band that people will like.”

Sounds like Liturgy’s taking after their founders more than their fans think. A truly black-metal mentality.

–Robert Miller