Review Summary: Intense, satisfying black metal from Brooklyn.
4 of 16 thought this review was well written
Traditional black metal, mostly Norwegian, has ignorance encoded into its DNA. The genre is notorious for its themes of racial and religious hatred along with extreme societal discontent and its traditionally undesirable musical tenants including murky, sordid production. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why Liturgy has become so reviled by the black metal community. Hailing from Brooklyn, the band explores Christian themes such as redemption. The album has clean production and you won’t see any of the members wearing corpse paint or burning churches. It seems the only Black thing about Liturgy is the music, and in an insular culture such as Black Metal, that’s not enough.
In terms of musical merit, it doesn’t really matter. Whether black metal fans are happy about it or not, Aesthethica is an album that shows that regardless of the philosophy behind the band, these guys are seriously talented. Between Hunter-Hunt Hendrix’s desperate, howling vocals and Greg Fox’s perfectly synchronous drumming, there is some top-notch musicianship on display here. There’s plenty of variety throughout the tracks - Returner is my personal favorite. It goes from a choppy, rough beginning with sudden starts and stops into a triumphant, exhilarating climax that I would almost call groovy. The following track, Generation, is a hypnotic seven minute Goliath that comes across as equally or more intense as the other, faster songs. On Aesthethica, you get a variety of sounds, but lulls are rare and the album is better for it.
You can call it pretentious, but you cannot deny that Aesthethica is everything the average metal listener wants - a visceral, dizzying, unrelenting, and really satisfying bit of music.
You can call it pretentious, but you cannot deny that Aesthethica is everything the average metal listener wants - a visceral, dizzying, unrelenting, and really satisfying bit of music.
yes i will call it pretentious, but i could never call it satisfying or entertaining or let alone average. It's just an example of a bunch of hipsters trying to gain notoriety by spouting bullshit because the music they produce is fetid wank
Traditional black metal, mostly Norwegian, has ignorance encoded into its DNA. The genre is notorious for its themes of racial and religious hatred along with extreme societal discontent and its traditionally undesirable musical tenants including murky, sordid production. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why Liturgy has become so reviled by the black metal community. Hailing from Brooklyn, the band explores Christian themes such as redemption. The album has clean production and you won’t see any of the members wearing corpse paint or burning churches. It seems the only Black thing about Liturgy is the music, and in an insular culture such as Black Metal, that’s not enough.
Oh the irony in this statement.
Besides that, I actually negged this for being a horribly written review. WHY IS THIS A 4.5? You haven't answered that yet. The only thing you've done is ranted about bm in general.
I do like Renihilation quite a bit but this is just more or less the same with less attention payed to atmosphere and more to how brutal they can sync up their tremolos with hyper blasts.
Oh right because Liturgy is the first and only bm band to not wear corpse paint and all Norwegians are ignorant, racist, nazi churchburners who wear spiked armbands all day and sacrifice goats for breakfast.
How could anyone rate this higher then maybe a 1.5/2?? p.s. Hunter Hunt Hendrix is a fucking clown. His little "paper" on Black Metal is the most pretentious thing ive read in ages.
"Oh right because Liturgy is the first and only bm band to not wear corpse paint and all Norwegians are ignorant, racist, nazi churchburners who wear spiked armbands all day and sacrifice goats for breakfast."
You can call it pretentious, but you cannot deny that Aesthethica is everything the average metal listener wants - a visceral, dizzying, unrelenting, and really satisfying bit of music.
Too bad they do all of those things in a totally annoying and utterly unsatisfying way, though, or I might have had to agree with you. Plenty of "modern" black metal groups use the same clean recording styles of this band, protest the use of corpse paint, and are applauded by the BM community for their work. This band is just a more annoying, less directioned Krallice.
