The Ark Work
Liturgy is a Brooklyn-based, self-styled “Transcendental Black Metal” band whose yearning, energetic music exists in an uncanny space between avant rock, black metal, fine art and shamanic ritual.
The first way to experience Liturgy’s The Ark Work is as a confounding mass of sound. Hearing it feels like watching someone's head split open, which might be an appropriate image for a band so concerned with annihilation and rebirth themes.
Liturgy mastermind/whipping boy Hunter Hunt-Hendrix has attracted acclaim from critics and disdain from metal purists ever since his “transcendental black metal” band first crawled out of the gentrified hamlet of Brooklyn in 2008. Now, after releasing two albums that toyed with the parameters of black metal, Liturgy…
The most unpopular black metal band in the world return with a new record that gives no quarters to the haters.
With the artful strategies Liturgy implemented on 2011's wonderfully excessive, brainy Aesthethica, they simultaneously alienated the purist black metal audience and attracted new fans whose tastes ran more to indie rock than extreme music.
Now billing themselves as a "21st century total work of art," Brooklyn black metal types Liturgy return with a sonically muddled effort.
Guys, Liturgy is fully trolling us. I've been on the internet long enough to know when I am being fucked with, and this is an exquisite...
Liturgy takes underground metal's confounded expectations, along with their own progressive black metal vision, to the nth degree on The Ark Work.
A review of The Ark Work by Liturgy, available March 30th in Europe and March 24th in North America via Thrill Jockey.