Liturgy tend to sort listeners into cynics and disciples. The first camp views the group as posers overthinking intentionally atavistic music—de facto trolls, making headlines for diatribes about their music’s transcendental intentions and its philosophical underpinnings. For the second camp, Liturgy are unapologetic radicals, channeling the basic spirit and sounds of black metal into experimental upheaval.
H.A.Q.Q., Liturgy’s fourth album, confirms what must have been right all along: The truth exists somewhere in the middle. Liturgy offer bait for the haters right there on the cover, with the philosophical framework of founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix—divided, for your convenience, into four categories, like Axiology and Cosmogony—serving as the album’s stark artwork. And Greg Fox, the hyper-precise drummer that even the naysayers respected, is gone. On the other hand, nothing else sounds quite like these nine volatile tracks, where electronic interference interrupts full-metal sprints and where hoarse screams and mutated strings bleed into one. Yes, H.A.Q.Q. cements Liturgy’s try-hard reputation. But it’s kind of thrilling to hear any band try this hard.
For Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy were always a way to explore his ideas about existence, which could make for an uncomfortable band power balance. Indeed, tensions over their dynamic led to a hiatus after 2011’s high-water mark Aesthethica. Only Hunt-Hendrix and guitarist Bernard Gann remain for H.A.Q.Q, with Fox replaced by ringer Leo Didkovsky and bassist Tyler Dusenbury swapped out for the versatile Tia Vincent-Clark. If you never checked the credits, you may never notice the difference: The rhythm section still flips between sprint and silence with light-switch precision, and the blast beats (yes, Hunt-Hendrix still calls them “burst beats”) continue to expand and contract, like lungs in the middle of a marathon.
But for Hunt-Hendrix and Gann, the lineup change feels like a permission slip to pursue a more aggressive and demanding version of Liturgy. Those stilted rap verses of The Ark Work notwithstanding, Liturgy have never bulldozed so many disparate sounds into the same claustrophobic space. During “HAJJ,” a lugubrious choir competes, at once, with tentacular harp lines, curdled screams, and guitar lines that prick like pins or slash like rusted razors. “God of Love”—perhaps the quintessential Liturgy track—buttresses wild expanses of black metal with a little choir of glockenspiel and vibraphone. They form intricate shapes within the din, creating a disorienting sense of infinite scale.
There’s never very much quarter during H.A.Q.Q., either. Liturgy’s interludes long doubled as the ellipses between connected thoughts, a brief shelter before the next wave hit. But here, these instrumentals are perhaps the most uneasy pieces. “Exaco I,” for instance, recalls the crisscrossing density of composer Conlon Nancarrow—who wrote pieces so tangled he composed them for the player piano—but as pounded out by Cecil Taylor. (Gann’s father, Kyle, is a Nancarrow scholar.) The chiming bells and disembodied operatic vocals of “Exaco II” feel like a moonlit stroll through an ancient graveyard. The album fades away with three minutes of miasmic solo guitar, the distortion strangling each note into one last gasp. It’s the ringing left in your ears after the music is over.
Parts of H.A.Q.Q. feel inchoate. And you’ll likely tire of Hunt-Hendrix’s new habit of splicing glitches inside these songs, a device meant to ratchet up tension that mostly produces tedium. But watch Hunt-Hendrix talk about his philosophy, his eyes darting uneasily in bed as he tries to define these ideas. Then listen to these songs, primal and often ecstatic expressions of something bigger than himself. If his ideas are a work in progress, the purpose of Liturgy is to test them, a process bound to include a little failure.
