And lo, the trumpets blared their fanfare to signal the arrival of Liturgy. A band that’s black metal only with poorly defined semantics, Liturgy’s announcing trumpets build to a noodled finale. In a matter of minutes, they’ve once again inspired the aggression of the metal boards and shown how ridiculous it is to ascribe to a band the simple titles we try to define them by.
The Ark Work, the awaited follow up to the still-divisive Aesthethica, plays its hand early on. “Fanfare” introduces The Ark Work as another destructive jab at metal purists; MIDI horns call forth ensuing noise and chaos. It’s a jumbled mess robbed of rhyme and order, but it stirs the ashes with an eager sense of deconstruction. Those horns are later joined by bagpipes and rattling guitars as The Ark Work continues its campaign, tossing through black metal’s pits with self-alienating gusto.
This isn’t new to Liturgy; they crossed these same fields in 2011 when their sophomore album, Aesthethica, turned the black metal community on itself. Purists declared war on the band, whom they saw as a group of defilers. Decried as a transcendental gang of posers in blue jeans, Liturgy ignited the black metal world. And now that that flame crackles to ash, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix has decided tend to that fire once more.
Liturgy doesn’t strictly adhere to rhythms and time signatures; those are changed at a moment’s notice. Instead, sprawling noise sputters across playtimes and breaks into bursts before settling for something more standard. Hunt-Hendrix growls in monotone over these structured breakdowns, which pulsate with organs and thunder with guitar chords. The most conventional track on The Ark Work is decidedly anti-metal; structured as a black metal standard, the nonsensical “Vitriol” turns to electronic ruminations and monotonous cadences.
Hunt-Hendrix recently said he founded Liturgy to “make people feel uncomfortable.” As the dissonant fade out of “Total War” signals the end of this crusade, it seems that Liturgy leaves a burning countryside of discomfort. Four years after declaring war on conventional metal, amid chaos and deformation, Liturgy’s war seems to have ground to a complacent persistence. In all its fanfare, The Ark Work thunders below its predecessors’ intensity. Yet, it still has enough vitriol to scorch metal’s traveled earths.
Grade: B
