Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the creative force behind the Brooklyn-based black-metal band Liturgy, has gone to extravagant lengths to ensure that the hardcore metal community utterly loathes him. The band performs black-metal festivals in jeans and street clothes, instead of the normal corpse paint, to heckling and jeers. In interviews, he talks about metal's ability to induce "disorientation from ordinary, end-directed existence" like some black-metal David Foster Wallace. He uses the music, which has virulent opposition to Christianity encoded in its DNA, as a vehicle to explore Big Ideas about, among other things, Christian redemption. Aesthethica, their second album, comes out on Thrill Jockey, home to the Sea and Cake, High Places, Fiery Furnaces, and absolutely zero other metal bands. Oh, and if you ask, he's also happy to share stories about hanging out with Ezra Koenig when they both went to Columbia University.
He and Koenig would probably still get along-- they both seem to take a perverse joy insouciantly baiting the easily riled. The hatred Liturgy have incurred is white-hot and laser-focused, as the Google search for "Liturgy black metal hipster assholes" eloquently attests. As it is with any genre, black metal "authenticity" is basically a smell test: It's black metal if it feels like black metal. It's an unassailable, indefinable, and profoundly inarguable criterion, but there it is. And it must be said that, in the end, Liturgy just don't feel like black metal. Somehow, you can hear the jeans.
Luckily, this doesn't matter in the slightest. In fact, it's Aesthethica's primary sense of strength. Without "reinventing" black metal, Liturgy have successfully refashioned its basic components-- the thundering, all-sixteenths assault of blast beats, shredding tremolo guitars, and boiled-pitch vocals-- in their own willful image and directed its energy toward the [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ir own idiosyncratic ends. Hunt-Hendrix might be the kind of guy who says things like, "The meaning of black metal has something to do with a longing for ecstatic annihilation, a perfect void," in interviews, but he's also the kind of musician who pursues these thoughts just as enthusiastically in his music. Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.
The idea of "a perfect void" can be heard in Liturgy's complicated relationship with momentum. Many songs here settle into a mesmerizing stasis as often as they barrel forward. Songs that seem to be gearing up for a stratospheric takeoff instead harden into a rhythmic lockstep. "Generation", for instance, grinds out a series of syncopations on a single thudding power chord for a mind-obliterating seven minutes. It resembles Steve Reich's 2 x 5, in which two rock ensembles face off onstage and play highly mannered figures at each other, more than the work of any metal band.
The echo of Reich isn't incidental; even more than their debut Renihilation, Aesthethica feels like black metal by way of the conservatory. Hunt-Hendrix, it turns out, studied composition at Columbia with spectralist composer Tristan Murail, and guitarist Bernard Gann is the son of the post-minimalist composer and former Village Voice critic Kyle Gann. You can hear the sound of A-students getting loose in some of Aesthethica's wilder moments: the glimmering fugue of guitars buzzing like mechanized locusts on "Sun of Light", for example, or the perpetual-motion keyboard canon that opens "Helix Skull". Hunt-Hendrix's words, which are utterly indistinguishable sans lyrics sheet, point determinedly toward the same transcendence the music seems to be aiming for: "Floating upwards/ Lungs filling up with air/ As God inhales me/ Into the impossible," Hunt-Hendrix screams on "True Will".
None of this will endear Liturgy to black-metal fanatics, of course. But every insular scene needs its carpetbaggers and interlopers, and Liturgy can hardly be accused of disrespect; you just don't make something this joyful out of music you hate. Without interested outsiders peeking their nosy way in, we would have never seen David Bowie, or Elvis Costello, or the Beastie Boys, or Bad Brains. Liturgy, for their part, seem more than willing to take their lumps for what they believe in. As Hunt-Hendrix recently told Time Out New York, "We are really willing to suffer being hated for doing what feels right aesthetically." If that isn't fucking kvlt, nothing is.
