It would seem there couldn’t have been a better harbinger of the metal show to come Tuesday night at the Hi-Dive than the torrential downpour that preceded the Liturgy show. Lightning flashed, 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 on Tuesday, for sure, but the band’s music leans toward 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 quartet’s songs screams metal. So does Greg Fox’s nearly chaotic yet exact drumming and Hunt-Hendrix’s and Bernard Gann’s darting, pinging guitar work. Hunt-Hendrix’s 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 “Aesthethica,” the band 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, it’s just too hard.
Sometimes it isn’t, though. The instrumental “Generation” was a thrashing delight; it’s one of the better songs — of any kind — released 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 Tuesday night are any indication, Liturgy may yet be on the brink of its own, gloriously unholy aesthetic.
Colin St. JohnMore music news and reviews at
