Liturgy

he is trying to transcend the haptic void duh

http://www.radicalmatters.com/metasound/pdf/Hideous.Gnosis.Black.Metal.Theory.Symposium.I.pdf

i saw greg fox drumming last weekend (not with liturgy) and i have some observations

1) what a maniac! wow. made it look so easy too.
2) he is the healthiest looking metal drummer i have seen in probably ever, kudos to him for that and also for wearing a shirt
3) i need to check out guardian alien bc i'm not sure i care about this band but he was an incredible drummer

no offense intended at other metal drummers -- they are probably v healthy

He's amazing. Definitely check out his work with Guardian Alien and Zs.

have enjoyed a GA record or two but when I saw them play it was kind of like a set-length drum solo with some other parts added as an afterthought

sick (healthy) drummer though for sure

i still have to listen to that Zs record. he talks about some healthy stuff here:
http://noisey.vice.com/en_ca/blog/greg-fox-guardian-alien-interview

I caught these guys last night. The songs really blossomed for me in a live setting; Hunt-Hendrix's voice sinks back and lets everything else take center stage. "Reign Array" was gorgeous and majestic.

Talking to friends, it seems they've been a bit hit or miss on this tour. Last night was hit after hit, even with a guitar dying on the second to last song. Greg Fox launched into a hypnotic solo as they sorted out replacement gear and then it was straight back to business.

Washington Post loves the drummer. Article on him

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/the-joy-of-drumming-with-liturgys-greg-fox/2015/04/06/75e66b4a-dc71-11e4-a500-1c5bb1d8ff6a_story.html

They should love Greg! Everyone should love Greg. Very nice guy, and a joy to watch and hear.

i just impulse bought a ticket to the show friday
i will turn into a pumpkin at midnight, but i'll get to catch the openers and they're pretty good (horse lords and another band i don't know) and a little of liturgy if i'm lucky.
his whole worldview re drumming is really otm and inspiring

Yes! Seeing Liturgy and Horse Lords on a double bill is a rad idea

The show in Dallas was Horse Lords at 8, Sannhet at 9 and Liturgy at 10. I was home by 11:30. It was awesome.

Hm, that might be worth a trip to Montreal.

Liturgy, Horse Lords, and Sannhet sounds very exhausting.

I'm looking forward to catching them with Lightning Bolt in a few weeks!

this show starts at 9 so i expect to miss some liturgy but that's ok bc i have a (really long) class to teach the next morning

Sund4r I'll be at that show
Greg is amazing, Guardian Alien is amazing

It wasn't exhausting at all. Maybe 2 hours and 10 minutes of music total, spread out over three hours and in pretty different styles.

Listening to Kel Valhaal for the first time

:D

all of metal heard this song and cried and cried

just the best sort of annoying

Why would metal cry at what sounds like a CD of In The Nursery skipping?

seriously

this album is brilliant. 'reign array' and 'follow II' the highights but it all makes sense to me.

imo Kel Valhaal is totally their career highpoint to date, to the extent that you could bin near enough all their other songs and I wouldn't be too bothered

it's also kind of a nonsense setting up this imaginary confrontation with 'metal' - if I'd heard it first w/o knowing it was Liturgy I'd guess it had come from that Mego/PAN side of the tracks and wouldn't have given metal music/culture any consideration. which I'd say was a success wrt what I imagine Liturgy were trying to achieve here

yer right, but the narrative is so hard to escape

I love this album, it's brilliant. It would be better maybe if some of the instruments sounded less artificial but I guess it goes well with the glitch elements. But it's an incredibly well-written record and it's certainly unique. I actually don't understand why Liturgy always get dumped on so much, they're one of the most creative and characterful bands around now imo.

Hunter H-H may allegedly be a pretentious pseud (never read the "manifesto", never will) but I don't why that's so enraging to metalheads. At least he's not a fucking fascist.

Their live show is face-meltingly loud, almost as loud as Melt-Banana

there's a bit in a pitchfork interview where he and his bandmates are just wandering around a jewish steam-room being all reflective and euphoric and it's pretty much the perfect evocation of why everyone hates them and why they're awesome. fwiw i reckon HHH is probably a mensch irl

'follow II' is a song that must, MUST have been written with me in mind. it's scarily close to what i'd want from a seven and a half minute metal song

ha melt-banana are the best gig i've ever been to, will have to see liturgy if they come around here

they're coming in a couple of weeks and I intend to be there

btw this album is absolutely extraordinary - 'follow II' is one of those pieces of music I'm staggered even exists - it feels like I must have dreamt it

Really, dude? Really?!

Their live show is face-meltingly loud, almost as loud as Melt-Banana

― I Am Curious (Dolezal) (DJP), Thursday, October 8, 2015 12:55 PM (1 week ago)

That was not my experience.

Mine either (although when I saw them they were just two dudes).

Yeah really. What is the beef?

No beef! I just don't find it, uh, oneiric.

To my ears it's charmless, depthless and so poorly produced as to be laughable; as someone who's listened to metal for thirty years and weird noise for twenty, I feel like I should be able to hear something in it that the fans hear.

So you guys can think I'm blind to it's grand beauty, I'll go back to listening to Tyranny and ignoring the fulsome praise people are heaping on Ark Work.

I haven't seen The Ark Work get a good reception ANYWHERE outside a few scattered dudes with odd taste though. I understand your reaction though, sometimes I can't help but be baffled when I see lots of praise for something I think is objectively terrible.

Seriously, this record is not popular. On RYM it has 2.71 out of 5 - for comparison's sake, Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz has 2.45. People are going well out of their way to pile on the hate. Even most of those who like it have severe reservations. Only a few mad souls are hip to Hunter's vibe, yo

(I think it is a crazy and ambitious experiment in sound and narrative that largely succeeds because rather than despite of the lengths it goes to to synthesise seemingly incongruent sonic palettes - it is an arrogant work, and all the better for this)

also it is bad

but less bad than the other liturgy records

honestly if they had made a whole album of "fanfare" I would be repping hard for these guys as an interesting (if not really related to metal) act - it develops really nicely, strikes me an an honest piece of "modern classical" writing

the rest of this is really pretty unoriginal to my ear, there are a ton of black metal bands from finland and norway and france who've been covering this kinda ground musically for ages. the one thing that's different is the indie-rock horns, or soft-horns, which I rather like in terms of what they're doing musically - but this whole Brooklyn approach to metal -- "it's black metal...plus horns! it's black metal...plus shoegaze!" is so tiresome. maybe just write good black metal and quit gunning for that BNM by being novel with the kitchen-sink biz?

but less bad than the other liturgy records

I like the two previous albums a lot, but I haven't even made it through this one.

the other two felt like (per jd) brooklyny genre exercises while the new one is at least kind of absurd in its blog-bait nature (or whatever the 2015 equivalent is).

i think it is a little strange that for all the goofy black metal appropriations and corpse paint minstrel show stuff of the past 10 years no one has decided to mash up "good production" and "black metal." all the liturgy stuff sounds almost as crummy as some one man ukrainian nazi bandcamp shit despite having an infinitely larger recording budget.

despite having an infinitely larger recording budget

Where's your evidence for this? They're on Thrill Jockey, not Roadrunner or even Metal Blade.

Also, there are plenty of black metal bands with good production! The French bands sound amazing, as does Satyricon (who just made a double live album with a fucking orchestra) and probably a million others, going back to Dimmu Borgir and Cradle of Filth in the late '90s/early '00s.

idk i feel like there are bands on thrill jockey that manage to record on a drumkit that's not made of papier-mache.

point taken re: french bm bands and the dimmu/cof type bands, though that stuff veers closer to over- rather than well-produced

i just want drums that sound good tbh. that cheesy deafheaven album has good drums

Seriously, this record is not popular. On RYM it has 2.71 out of 5 - for comparison's sake,

"Seriously, a site that thinks Madvillainy is one of the 100 greatest records of all time doesn't like this album"

there are a ton of black metal bands from finland and norway and france who've been covering this kinda ground musically for ages

to an extent, but I do often try to listen to such music and to my ears this sounds like it is genuinely up to something different, both in the use of shifting rhythms and the chiming rasping electronic textural overload - it is euphoric art-rock more than BM perhaps but this does not invalidate it

maybe just write good black metal and quit gunning for that BNM by being novel with the kitchen-sink biz?

I believe HHH when he says this is the closest he's gotten to recording the sound in his head. I don't suspect he'd be good at just good pop black metal because his heart would not be in it. he is a precocious little shit who's biting off barely as much as he cam chew - he is shooting at the moon because he can't see anywhere beneath it. I can well empathise with this - leave prudence and timeworn craft to those who have the patience to make such music. we need our stubborn innovators too, even if they're really truly in actual fact making 2007-era indie rock (comparable examples please)

also his songwriting narratives are p exciting to me - the way follow ii builds and then dissolves over and over again into the abyss - that is spectacular imo and I have heard an awful lot of spectacular music

Whiney yr not srsly going to make me cherrypick something worse outta the Acclaimed Music top hundred right

it's crude but it illustrates just how much antipathy the metal community, very many of whom post to RYM, has for the album

What other albums does this sound like? I thought it was fairly unique which is why it's been singled out for hatred. I mean if there's other stuff like this out there I want to hear it

I just wish all the huffy dismissal that H3 gets was directed at Deafheaven tbh

I’ve been criticized in the past for being so wide-eyed, sincere and ambitious about creating new forms for conveying like heartfelt emotion

really?

i’m def someone who def thought liturgy’s whole thing was too pretentious to bear but i’m glad i’ve since come around.

I think the music is great, the pretension is fine, the sanctimony is unbearable.

And HHH's parents developed something called imago relationship therapy. O_o

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imago_therapy

haha

lol

Wait, we’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we?

This band are really good at one thing, and one thing only, and that's the "vibrant blast-beat chorale" thing. They have not at all figured out how to synthesize that one thing with any other thing.

The last minute of "The Fall Of SIHEMYN" is the thing that is good. I dislike everything else about this album

This band afaic has always been defined by the first two tracks of their first LP-- a terribly conceived, terribly executed a cappella "new music" intro, followed by a thrilling blast-beat chorale ("Pagan Dawn", by far their best track and one of my favourite songs in the world, seeing it live in 2011 was spectacular)

I cannot think of a worse opening track than the first track on The Ark Work, I hate it like I hate Eno's "The Drop" or the ninth Felt album

xps The discussion page on that article is killing me.

What a mess. Not only is it entirely unformatted, it seems to be a paper someone wrote in enthusiastic support of Imago (perhaps even at the behest of Imago), cherry-picking details from studies that support Imago without once referencing any criticisms.

;_;

"Generation" remains one of my very favorite rock songs

the poo_er of the angryman ffs

god bless you, ever rong

this is less engaging than haqq and less formally interesting than the ark work but i still enjoy it. not sure the messiaen version works

yeah it's not as good as the previous two, but still good, basically

Yeah the Messiaen cover doesn't ruin it but doesn't match up to the original and takes up too much of the runtime. The opening run of tracks is phenomenal, though.

Is this album really not leagues better than their previous couple? I clicked with it right away upon hearing it, like to the point where I thought it was one of the best albums of the year in the past three weeks. It's definitely too short, kinda feels like the first act of a three act opera, with the Messiaen acting like the vorspiel

Yeah, but WHAT a Bushwick landlord!

what?

the problem is that it SOUNDS like it was made by a bushwick landlord

― here 1st (roxymuzak), Wednesday, 22 March 2023 16:14 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Anyway, this new album is awesome

Have an interview: https://www.thefader.com/2023/03/23/liturgy-the-fader-interview-feature