Liturgy, PC Worship September 22, 2011

21+

Liturgy
"Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the creative force behind the Brooklyn-based black-metal band Liturgy, has gone to extravagant lengths to ensure that the hardcore metal community utterly loathes him. The band performs black-metal festivals in jeans and street clothes, instead of the normal corpse paint, to heckling and jeers. In interviews, he talks about metal's ability to induce "disorientation from ordinary, end-directed existence" like some black-metal David Foster Wallace. He uses the music, which has virulent opposition to Christianity encoded in its DNA, as a vehicle to explore Big Ideas about, among other things, Christian redemption. Aesthethica, their second album, comes out on Thrill Jockey, home to the Sea and Cake, High Places, Fiery Furnaces, and absolutely zero other metal bands. Oh, and if you ask, he's also happy to share stories about hanging out with Ezra Koenig when they both went to Columbia University.

He and Koenig would probably still get along-- they both seem to take a perverse joy insouciantly baiting the easily riled. The hatred Liturgy have incurred is white-hot and laser-focused, as the Google search for "Liturgy black metal hipster assholes" eloquently attests. As it is with any genre, black metal "authenticity" is basically a smell test: It's black metal if it feels like black metal. It's an unassailable, indefinable, and profoundly inarguable criterion, but there it is. And it must be said that, in the end, Liturgy just don't feel like black metal. Somehow, you can hear the jeans.

Luckily, this doesn't matter in the slightest. In fact, it's Aesthethica's primary sense of strength. Without "reinventing" black metal, Liturgy have successfully refashioned its basic components-- the thundering, all-sixteenths assault of blast beats, shredding tremolo guitars, and boiled-pitch vocals-- in their own willful image and directed its energy toward the ir own idiosyncratic ends. Hunt-Hendrix might be the kind of guy who says things like, "The meaning of black metal has something to do with a longing for ecstatic annihilation, a perfect void," in interviews, but he's also the kind of musician who pursues these thoughts just as enthusiastically in his music. Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career." - Pitchfork Media
Thrill Jockey
Mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/liturgynybm

PC Worship
PC Worship are sure to turn our brains into a glowing pink syrupy substance. Cave-folk strumming, weird chords stretch out into breezy oblivion without any warning, and return as something completely different.Acoustic guitar fragments chip away and float out to space, and just when you had forgotten about them, they slowly resurface as woozy saxophone squeal.
Mp3s: http://www.myspace.com/pcworshipp

Official Website: http://manicproductions.org/shows/2307