It would seem there couldn’t have been a better harbinger of the metal show to come last night at the than the torrential downpour that preceded the show. Lightening crashed, the streets turned to rivers, sirens rang out: It was Biblical — in an Iron Maiden album cover sort of way.
Liturgy toes a unique line between its black metal categorization and a wider, independent recording sphere. The dudes with nose piercings and black t-shirts were at the Hi-Dive last night, for sure, but the band’s music leans towards a genre-bending that clarifies Liturgy’s residency on the buffet-sampling Thrill Jockey Records. Liturgy is unorthodox.
Still, baby-faced frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s shrieking growl on most of the quartetap songs screams metal. So does Greg Fox’s chaotic yet exact drumming and Hunt-Hendrix’s and Bernard Gann’s darting, pinging guitarwork. His growl is alarming and can be distracting from the musical connections and chord progressions made behind it. It is, of course, an integral part of Liturgy’s chosen subgenre, yet renders many of the songs indistinguishable. Cycling through much of its recent, blazing “Aesthethica” often fell back on a formula: tremolos preceding Hunt-Hendrix’s bellow which, then, led into a climactic surge. Liturgy is challenging its audience to a level of sophistication in extricating its complex undercurrents but, much of the time, itap just too damn hard.
Sometimes itap not, though. The instrumental “Generation” was a thrashing delight; itap one of the better songs — of any kind — released so far this year. The slow crawl of the vocal-less “Veins of God” leaned more on mainstream Metallica-like metal and also banged. It might be too much to ask another group to abandon pretense and go for broke in forging its own niche. But, Liturgy already touches upon rock, noise rock, post-rock, math rock and even a soupcon of a fusion of doom and stoner metal. So, as absurd as the suggestion might be: lose — or at the very least, pare down — the screams. If moments of “Aesthethica” and last night are any indication, Liturgy may yet be on the brink of its own, gloriously unholy aesthetic.
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Colin St. John is a Denver-based writer and merrymaker. Follow him on and check out his .
Joe McCabe is a Denver photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb. Check out his .
