The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. The band seems to have designed it that way: Along with the guitars and percussion, there are horns, strings, constantly hammering glockenspiel, even bagpipes, all blaring at once, like 11 open browser tabs autoplaying or a block of car alarms set off by a passing motorcycle. Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the band’s leading force and The Ark Work’s primary arranger, has talked in interviews about realizing the sound in his head; The Ark Work, he claims, is the closest he’s come to sharing it with us. The sound he's designed here feels purposefully too large, a pressurized force exploding out of confinement. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with themes of annihilation and rebirth.
The second way to experience The Ark Work is as a kind of aesthetic gauntlet, hurled with an audible clunk. Liturgy’s previous albums, 2009’s Renihilation and 2011’s Aesthethica, cast Hunt-Hendrix’s imposing ideas—which he has tried to clarify, perhaps comically, in a pair of perfectly inscrutable diagrams included with The Ark Work’s packaging—in songlike forms. The Ark Work is closer, in its 57-minute expanse and grandeur, to a symphony—something long and Germanic, maybe by Bruckner. Long sections of it hang stubbornly in place, pitched between bedlam and boredom, before surging over another exhilarating crag in the music’s development.
Recurring themes pop up, like alpine flowers dotting a mountainside. "Follow", the album’s first full track, begins with a chiming contrapuntal figure in the glockenspiels, led by pedal tones in the bass line. It has a fragile, otherworldly quality, which the band snuffs out briskly when it plunges in moments later. The theme resurfaces a few tracks later, on "Follow II", played by an organ, on "Haelegen", and then again on "Total War". Each time, it feels like a welcome space for contemplation amidst the chaos.
These moments provide navigable markers on what can frankly be an imposing, even dismaying listen. The Ark Work is harmonically rich, but very slow; to say that it moves is to point out that glass is technically a liquid. The most awe-inspiring payoffs occur after agonizing liftoff: On "Follow II", strings and horns lifts the music up, like pigeons on strings tied to a Mahlerian orchestra. The mass seems to hang an inch or two above ground, groaning and threatening to split open, before the seams burst and Hunt-Hendrix’s little voice spills out.
This sense of watching an impossible bulk lift skyward is the most thrilling sensation The Ark Work provides, and it happens two or three times across the album. In these moments, Hunt-Hendrix’s thrashing ambitions feel justified, and they position Liturgy not as descendants of black metal but of Swans, eager to chase exhilaration to punishing, Herculean extremes. The crazed energy of Ark’s best music feels indebted to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, and Hunt-Hendrix has more than a touch of Herzog’s maddening genius/genius madman dynamic about him. In both cases, the primary question haunting the project's edges is "Is this guy kidding?"
The Ark Work has another unfortunate Herzog parallel, and it’s a specific one: In order to enjoy the grand vision before you, you have to block the sometimes-irritating sound of the creator’s voice from your ears. On previous albums, Hunt-Hendrix screamed in a register that was both shocking and oddly delicate, like gift wrap tearing. On The Ark Work, he drones on a single note, with very little variation, for most of the time. It sounds deadening on first contact, and it doesn’t reveal much depth on repeated listens. He seems to be aiming for a trancelike, occult mood, and he has referenced the triplet flows of Three 6 Mafia as inspiration. The long incantatory passages of "Quetzalcoatl" and "Father Vorizen", which seem like his most direct attempts at applying this rhythm, offer a handy example of just how far a sound can travel from its origin.
That is a charitable way of saying that his vocals often border on unendurable. On "Father Vorizen", his droning is mostly tuneless and nearly rhythmless, a persistent hum that you find yourself wanting to swat away. Because it is competing with massive elements, his voice has been doubled up and set slightly to the side in the mix, making him sound less an entranced cult leader, stoking the flames, than someone mumbling in a corner. When he moans "The doors of perception will open and close/ Hope will exist in a problematic relationship with reason/ Libidinal energy will whirl round like a rattle rattling/ Hearts will be stopped bones will shatter shattering," on "Quetzalcoatl", the prevailing knock on Liturgy as a dog-and-pony show for Hunt-Hendrix’s half-baked musings feels uncomfortably close at hand.
It is an unfair judgment to pass on the glorious, rippling full-band unit, however: Greg Fox, one of the most intuitive, thrilling, and musical drummers of his generation, is back in the band, and his playing, as it did on Aesthethica, feels truer to the spirit of Hunt-Hendrix’s philosophy than any of his declarations. The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of listens. For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends. The stretch of music covering the album’s first five tracks—"Fanfare" to "Quetzalcoatl"—invokes awe, terror, confusion, joy, despair. At this point, however, The Ark Work is less than half over. Inevitably, some chair-squirming occurs. Fatigue sets in; interest ebbs. This is the flip side of grandeur: When you stretch it out far enough, it becomes difficult to distinguish from terminal boredom.
