February 1, 2012
#1: Liturgy - Aesthethica And of course, the record I picked as my favorite of the year would also turn out to be the most controversial record on my list. When I got into Liturgy, and for quite a while afterward, I had no idea there was any sort of controversy around them. I discovered their 2009 debut album, Renihilation, late in 2010. Someone on some message board or someplace mentioned to me that Liturgy was a new American black metal band who were doing something pretty great, and I trusted their opinion enough to check it out. Renihilation, with its relatively straightforward take on lo-fi, stripped-down, levels-in-the-red black metal, won me over instantly, and I played it a fair amount over the next six months or so. Then Thrill Jockey, who have the magazine where I work on their promo list, sent me a digital copy of Aesthethica, which struck me as Liturgy taking things to a whole new level. By this point, I’d learned from friends who still kept up with the insular internet-gossip world of the progressive hardcore underground (as opposed to the underground hardcore scenes centered around tough guy moshcore and first-wave revivalism) that Liturgy was made up of people who’d been playing screamo bands a few years before, singer/guitarist/chief songwriter Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in particular having been in the Birthday Boyz, whom I’d never heard of before but clearly had some relevance in the screamo scene. It was much clearer from the sound of Aesthethica that this influence existed, too. One entire song, the seven-minute instrumental “Generation,” was based around a mathematically complex riff that wasn’t too far from something Lightning Bolt or Don Caballero might do, while other less black metal-sounding intros or breakdowns that appeared in various places on the album were also clearly coming from a post-hardcore approach. Yet still, to me, what came through most clearly was black metal. And it makes sense for a band who grew up in the hardcore and post-hardcore scenes of the past decade to end up with a pretty strong black metal influence. In the early 90s, when bands like Mayhem, Burzum, Immortal, and Emperor were getting just as much notice in the American metal underground for the criminal activities of their members as for their groundbreaking music, morbid fascination led a lot of metal fans (many of whom happened to be hardcore kids) to check out the Norwegian black metal scene. By 1995 or so, you could hear black metal influences in the sound of such diverse bands as One Eyed God Prophecy, Prayer For Cleansing, and Suicide Nation. The riff structures, blastbeats, and double-time strumming that characterized the black metal sound worked its way down through the evolutionary currents of the hardcore underground, until some of it was showing up in bands that the Birthday Boyz would likely have regarded as contemporaries. When people talk about underground scenes like these, I often get the feeling that they see outside influence as either unlikely or downright impossible. Perhaps this is due to the sort of fiercely loyal groupthink that can take over these small scenes. Such hive-mind tendencies can be both good and bad; good in that they help to facilitate the survival of a tiny scene that, if it becomes too diffuse, could evaporate entirely, but bad in that they foster an environment which takes interest in anything outside itself as an existential threat. When I went to basement shows in the mid-90s, I only talked to other attendees about bands like Antioch Arrow and Indian Summer. No one knew who was going home and listening to Slayer, or Nick Drake, or R. Kelly. Maybe all of us were dabbling in a variety of non-sanctioned genres, but nobody was talking about it. When I talk to people about Liturgy who claim that screamo kids couldn’t possibly know enough about black metal to start a black metal band, it’s this kind of cultural myopia that I see at work. None of us have any real idea of what Hunter Hunt-Hendrix was listening to back then. Based on the way Liturgy sounds now, though, I think the guy’s got to be pretty well-versed in the history of black metal. I’ve noticed from live recordings of Liturgy that I’ve heard that his screamed vocals are quite high-pitched; when they’re as forward in the mix as they tend to be on live recordings, he often sounds like a fan of such y2k-era screamo bands as Jerome’s Dream or Orchid. However, on Aesthethica, the vocals are placed relatively low in the mix, and are drenched in reverb, creating the impression of some poor anguished soul howling out his deepest fears and sorrows to the unforgiving walls of a large, empty room. What I hear in Liturgy’s vocals is a combination of influences taken from the angry antisocial railing of early black metal bands like Emperor or even 80s-era genre inventors Bathory, mixed with the more emotionally-centered vocal tones of hardcore bands like Converge or Pg. 99. Aesthethica contains its fair share of deviations from the sonic template of black metal, as on “Generations” or the early Mastodon-style midtempo riffing that makes up “Veins Of God.” However, when they are in straightforward black metal mode—as they are for the significant majority of this album—they construct their riffs out of the same quick chord changes running up and down the fretboard that can be heard in bands like Immortal or Emperor. Really, though, the band they most remind me of is Swedish group Marduk. Liturgy tend to play in higher keys than Marduk do, and they sound like they’re using different kinds of chords—specifically, Liturgy use the higher-pitched, more emotional-sounding octave chords, while Marduk go with darker, angrier-sounding power chords—but they construct their songs in very similar fashion. The most obvious musical innovation that Liturgy brings to the table is a variety of blastbeat that Hunter Hunt-Hendrix calls the burst beat. Like a typical blast beat, it’s based around extremely frequent snare hits, which often reach speeds of 300 BPM or better. However, in a burst beat, the blasting changes speeds within individual measures of a riff, and tends to incorporate relatively frequent pauses. Strangely enough, this shifting, pausing beat actually heightens the emotional tension of Liturgy’s music, even though it seems on paper like it should disrupt it. On songs like “Red Crown,” when a verse reaches its end and the drummer pauses for a two or four-beat rest, the sudden slam back into the hyperspeed riffing which comes at the end of that rest hits like a ton of bricks. The combination of Hunt-Hendrix’s anguished screams and frantically strummed guitar riffs with the shifting burst beats of drummer Greg Fox—whose work is integral to the sound of this album, and who unfortunately quit Liturgy a couple of months ago; how will they ever replace him?—all work together to give this album an extremely angst-ridden sound. I think this is a lot of what initially attracted me to Liturgy’s music; as a person who is angst-ridden at the best of times, I find their music to have a lot of emotional resonance in my daily life. And this is true despite the fact that I know pretty much nothing about what Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is singing about. The sound of his voice is enough to get the point across, at least for me. I’ve owned a copy of this album for nearly nine months, but I’m still playing it multiple times a week, and I still have trouble sitting still when I listen to it. It moves me, both emotionally and literally. I still haven’t talked about the controversy surrounding Liturgy, and that’s mainly because I don’t want to. My attachment to this band was formed completely separately from the manifestos they’ve released. I’m still only somewhat aware of them; my attempts to read Hunt-Hendrix’s Hideous Gnosis: Transcendental Black Metal paper have all ended in frustration and confusion. I’m pretty sure I get the basic point, but I think a lot of the details are difficult to parse, and since I understand the basic point, I’m not sure it’s worth it to dig any deeper. His point seems to be that American black metal as a genre and a movement needs to separate itself from the earlier forms of black metal, which were much darker and more nihilistic, while retaining the aesthetic qualities that made the genre a worthwhile form of music. He seems to find the earlier forms of black metal, which he refers to as Hyperborean (did he intend to remind me of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with this term?), to be on a downward spiral into negativity and irrelevance, though I get the idea that he considered it vital and important at one time. His suggestion for a new direction for American black metal is towards transcendence, the idea of the aesthetics (he spells it “aesthethics,” hence the album title. Is this an intentional misspelling, or is it supposed to be an independent term with a different meaning? That, I cannot tell you) of black metal being directed towards catharsis, and a denial of nihilism in favor of light and… perhaps even joy? Like I said, the details are vague, at least to me.  What I can tell from reading what I’ve read of Liturgy’s philosophy is that they are turning away from the negativity and elitism—which is often linked to extreme right wing political philosophies, such as crypto-fascism, the pagan/Satanist authoritarianism of neo-volkisch movements, and even outright neo-Nazism—that dominates the thinking of many black metal fans, scenes, and bands. As much as I do enjoy black metal as a musical style, it’s tough sometimes to feel comfortable with listening to it, and there are some bands who are considered quite important to the musical evolution of the genre—most importantly Burzum and Darkthrone—that I refuse to listen to. While I love Emperor, who were less integral to the criminal activities of the early-90s Norwegian black metal scene but still very much a part of it, it’s tough for me to reconcile the fact that their first LP was recorded inbetween when their drummer committed a murder and when he was arrested for it. I feel a bit more comfortable with later LPs that feature a different drummer, but I still wonder sometimes if I’m a bad person for listening to any of their stuff. I feel like I’m on firmer ethical ground with musically important but non-criminal bands from the Scandinavian region, such as Enslaved, Marduk, and At The Gates, but the truth is that any northern European band linked with the black metal scene has a better than even chance of having extreme right-wing ties. That reality makes me uncomfortable, but I think I’m probably in the minority there. I feel like there are some black metal fans who feel the way I do, and some who just don’t care about the politics of the music they listen to (even if they do hold divergent political beliefs). But where most black metal fans, particularly fans in America, are concerned, I think a lot of them romanticize the right-wing beliefs of European black metal bands. In Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise Of The Satanic Metal Underground, which is (sadly) probably the most authoritative black metal-related history currently extant, co-author Michael Moynihan gives a detailed sociological explanation for the movement towards right-wing political extremism in the Norwegian black metal underground. His contention, if I remember correctly (I don’t currently own a copy of the book), is that the liberal socialist society of late 20th century Scandinavia lead to widespread ennui amongst the youth of the region, and that the contrast between their society and that of their pagan Viking forefathers in centuries past made the idea of tearing down modern society in favor of a return to pre-Christian Scandinavian values quite attractive. Moynihan’s theory makes a lot of sense; in fact, despite the political reality of the modern United States, which is far more repressive and draconian, and far less economically comfortable for the majority of its population, I see a lot of the same ennui and romantic interest in right-wing iconography and ideology in the upper-class white youth culture of the present-day United States—or at least in the extreme musical underground version of that culture. The advent of “mysterious guy hardcore” (which is a whole other story, one that I’ve wanted to tackle for quite a while, but is outside the purview of this article) has involved quite a bit of interest in the crypto-fascist right wing of the industrial noise scene, particularly focused on Whitehouse, a group I find truly repugnant. The fact that important socially-liberal issues of the past decades seem for the most part to be settled (at least from the upper-class white point of view) has inspired a rather ironic return within white youth culture to flirtation with, and sometimes even open advocacy of, racism, sexism, and other forms of intolerance towards those different from oneself. By the way, it should be noted that Michael Moynihan has often been accused of advocating fascist beliefs himself, and though, after coyly refusing to take a stand in either direction throughout most of the 90s, he’s recently begun to openly reject fascist movements that he’s previously been linked to, his rejections often still bear the telltale tone of crypto-fascist beliefs. Which is to say, I do not trust the guy, and despite finding merit in his sociological theorizing within Lords Of Chaos, I do not share any of the tacit approval that is a textual undercurrent within that book. Just in case there was any doubt about that. There are plenty of people who fit this sociological profile within the ranks of American black metal fans, and boy does Liturgy piss them the hell off. While Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s manifestos may be difficult to parse, quotes like one he recently gave to Spin, as part of a story by Christopher Weingarten about black metal bands who don’t fit the genre’s typical profile, make clear exactly what they hate about him: “Sometimes it feels like there were metalheads just waiting for this band to come along to hate it. Certain signifiers of looking a certain way and things are really meaningful to people. But it’s important to just do what you want to do, you know?” What’s fun is contrasting that quote with the article’s previous paragraph, which I will quote in full: Idiosyncratic moves like this are the core of DIY, but in the insular, identity-crazed shred-o-verse, they cause headbangers like black metal misanthrope Wrest of Leviathan to get up in arms. “I’ve never farmed in my life and I don’t play a flute by a campfire,” he told Decibel in October, as he awaited trial for sexual assault. “That shit’s just corny. Black metal at the end of the day is about Satan and will always be about Satan. Black metal seems to be for hipsters with their girlfriend’s pants on nowadays.” I admire Weingarten’s subtle insertion of the clause that I bolded, casually dropping in the fact that the person he’s quoting, who is going all-out to approve of black metal’s links to right-wing ideology, is also the sort of person that no halfway decent human being should want to be associated with. However, Wrest is a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I talk about extreme music fans who romanticize and fetishize right-wing iconography, and to understand just how perfect, you should all read up on exactly what he’s been charged with and what he’s had to say about it. A good place to start is Brandon Stosuy’s interview with him for Pitchfork, from September (note the dig at Liturgy in the answer to a question about defining black metal). Stosuy’s questions are softball-ish at times, but the interview was conducted over email, so I suppose if he’d been hard-hitting he might not have gotten any answers at all. I’d also direct you to the original print article on the crime, from the Chicago Sun-Times (who seemed to have no idea about Wrest/Whitehead’s musical career). Like a lot of the important figures on the early 90s Norwegian black metal scene, notably Burzum leader Varg Vikernes, Wrest comes off like a disturbed and dangerous individual. Regardless of any personal right-wing allegiances he (or Varg, for that matter) may have, he’s the sort of person you probably would want to have as little one-on-one contact with as possible. And these are the sorts of people who find Liturgy most disturbing. For someone with my own political beliefs, that’s comforting, and at times even amusing. Some of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s more prominent quotes are flat-out trolling people like this, and I’m pretty sure he’s doing it intentionally. Regardless of how much I like Liturgy, I find it enjoyable to read quotes like this. And in light of how much pleasure I’ve gotten out of Aesthethica over the course of the past year, it is an outright joy to for once feel completely comfortable with a great black metal album.

#1: Liturgy - Aesthethica

And of course, the record I picked as my favorite of the year would also turn out to be the most controversial record on my list. When I got into Liturgy, and for quite a while afterward, I had no idea there was any sort of controversy around them. I discovered their 2009 debut album, Renihilation, late in 2010. Someone on some message board or someplace mentioned to me that Liturgy was a new American black metal band who were doing something pretty great, and I trusted their opinion enough to check it out. Renihilation, with its relatively straightforward take on lo-fi, stripped-down, levels-in-the-red black metal, won me over instantly, and I played it a fair amount over the next six months or so. Then Thrill Jockey, who have the magazine where I work on their promo list, sent me a digital copy of Aesthethica, which struck me as Liturgy taking things to a whole new level.

By this point, I’d learned from friends who still kept up with the insular internet-gossip world of the progressive hardcore underground (as opposed to the underground hardcore scenes centered around tough guy moshcore and first-wave revivalism) that Liturgy was made up of people who’d been playing screamo bands a few years before, singer/guitarist/chief songwriter Hunter Hunt-Hendrix in particular having been in the Birthday Boyz, whom I’d never heard of before but clearly had some relevance in the screamo scene. It was much clearer from the sound of Aesthethica that this influence existed, too. One entire song, the seven-minute instrumental “Generation,” was based around a mathematically complex riff that wasn’t too far from something Lightning Bolt or Don Caballero might do, while other less black metal-sounding intros or breakdowns that appeared in various places on the album were also clearly coming from a post-hardcore approach.

Yet still, to me, what came through most clearly was black metal. And it makes sense for a band who grew up in the hardcore and post-hardcore scenes of the past decade to end up with a pretty strong black metal influence. In the early 90s, when bands like Mayhem, Burzum, Immortal, and Emperor were getting just as much notice in the American metal underground for the criminal activities of their members as for their groundbreaking music, morbid fascination led a lot of metal fans (many of whom happened to be hardcore kids) to check out the Norwegian black metal scene. By 1995 or so, you could hear black metal influences in the sound of such diverse bands as One Eyed God Prophecy, Prayer For Cleansing, and Suicide Nation. The riff structures, blastbeats, and double-time strumming that characterized the black metal sound worked its way down through the evolutionary currents of the hardcore underground, until some of it was showing up in bands that the Birthday Boyz would likely have regarded as contemporaries.

When people talk about underground scenes like these, I often get the feeling that they see outside influence as either unlikely or downright impossible. Perhaps this is due to the sort of fiercely loyal groupthink that can take over these small scenes. Such hive-mind tendencies can be both good and bad; good in that they help to facilitate the survival of a tiny scene that, if it becomes too diffuse, could evaporate entirely, but bad in that they foster an environment which takes interest in anything outside itself as an existential threat. When I went to basement shows in the mid-90s, I only talked to other attendees about bands like Antioch Arrow and Indian Summer. No one knew who was going home and listening to Slayer, or Nick Drake, or R. Kelly. Maybe all of us were dabbling in a variety of non-sanctioned genres, but nobody was talking about it.

When I talk to people about Liturgy who claim that screamo kids couldn’t possibly know enough about black metal to start a black metal band, it’s this kind of cultural myopia that I see at work. None of us have any real idea of what Hunter Hunt-Hendrix was listening to back then. Based on the way Liturgy sounds now, though, I think the guy’s got to be pretty well-versed in the history of black metal. I’ve noticed from live recordings of Liturgy that I’ve heard that his screamed vocals are quite high-pitched; when they’re as forward in the mix as they tend to be on live recordings, he often sounds like a fan of such y2k-era screamo bands as Jerome’s Dream or Orchid. However, on Aesthethica, the vocals are placed relatively low in the mix, and are drenched in reverb, creating the impression of some poor anguished soul howling out his deepest fears and sorrows to the unforgiving walls of a large, empty room.

What I hear in Liturgy’s vocals is a combination of influences taken from the angry antisocial railing of early black metal bands like Emperor or even 80s-era genre inventors Bathory, mixed with the more emotionally-centered vocal tones of hardcore bands like Converge or Pg. 99. Aesthethica contains its fair share of deviations from the sonic template of black metal, as on “Generations” or the early Mastodon-style midtempo riffing that makes up “Veins Of God.” However, when they are in straightforward black metal mode—as they are for the significant majority of this album—they construct their riffs out of the same quick chord changes running up and down the fretboard that can be heard in bands like Immortal or Emperor. Really, though, the band they most remind me of is Swedish group Marduk. Liturgy tend to play in higher keys than Marduk do, and they sound like they’re using different kinds of chords—specifically, Liturgy use the higher-pitched, more emotional-sounding octave chords, while Marduk go with darker, angrier-sounding power chords—but they construct their songs in very similar fashion.

The most obvious musical innovation that Liturgy brings to the table is a variety of blastbeat that Hunter Hunt-Hendrix calls the burst beat. Like a typical blast beat, it’s based around extremely frequent snare hits, which often reach speeds of 300 BPM or better. However, in a burst beat, the blasting changes speeds within individual measures of a riff, and tends to incorporate relatively frequent pauses. Strangely enough, this shifting, pausing beat actually heightens the emotional tension of Liturgy’s music, even though it seems on paper like it should disrupt it. On songs like “Red Crown,” when a verse reaches its end and the drummer pauses for a two or four-beat rest, the sudden slam back into the hyperspeed riffing which comes at the end of that rest hits like a ton of bricks. The combination of Hunt-Hendrix’s anguished screams and frantically strummed guitar riffs with the shifting burst beats of drummer Greg Fox—whose work is integral to the sound of this album, and who unfortunately quit Liturgy a couple of months ago; how will they ever replace him?—all work together to give this album an extremely angst-ridden sound.

I think this is a lot of what initially attracted me to Liturgy’s music; as a person who is angst-ridden at the best of times, I find their music to have a lot of emotional resonance in my daily life. And this is true despite the fact that I know pretty much nothing about what Hunter Hunt-Hendrix is singing about. The sound of his voice is enough to get the point across, at least for me. I’ve owned a copy of this album for nearly nine months, but I’m still playing it multiple times a week, and I still have trouble sitting still when I listen to it. It moves me, both emotionally and literally.

I still haven’t talked about the controversy surrounding Liturgy, and that’s mainly because I don’t want to. My attachment to this band was formed completely separately from the manifestos they’ve released. I’m still only somewhat aware of them; my attempts to read Hunt-Hendrix’s Hideous Gnosis: Transcendental Black Metal paper have all ended in frustration and confusion. I’m pretty sure I get the basic point, but I think a lot of the details are difficult to parse, and since I understand the basic point, I’m not sure it’s worth it to dig any deeper. His point seems to be that American black metal as a genre and a movement needs to separate itself from the earlier forms of black metal, which were much darker and more nihilistic, while retaining the aesthetic qualities that made the genre a worthwhile form of music. He seems to find the earlier forms of black metal, which he refers to as Hyperborean (did he intend to remind me of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories with this term?), to be on a downward spiral into negativity and irrelevance, though I get the idea that he considered it vital and important at one time. His suggestion for a new direction for American black metal is towards transcendence, the idea of the aesthetics (he spells it “aesthethics,” hence the album title. Is this an intentional misspelling, or is it supposed to be an independent term with a different meaning? That, I cannot tell you) of black metal being directed towards catharsis, and a denial of nihilism in favor of light and… perhaps even joy? Like I said, the details are vague, at least to me. 

What I can tell from reading what I’ve read of Liturgy’s philosophy is that they are turning away from the negativity and elitism—which is often linked to extreme right wing political philosophies, such as crypto-fascism, the pagan/Satanist authoritarianism of neo-volkisch movements, and even outright neo-Nazism—that dominates the thinking of many black metal fans, scenes, and bands. As much as I do enjoy black metal as a musical style, it’s tough sometimes to feel comfortable with listening to it, and there are some bands who are considered quite important to the musical evolution of the genre—most importantly Burzum and Darkthrone—that I refuse to listen to. While I love Emperor, who were less integral to the criminal activities of the early-90s Norwegian black metal scene but still very much a part of it, it’s tough for me to reconcile the fact that their first LP was recorded inbetween when their drummer committed a murder and when he was arrested for it. I feel a bit more comfortable with later LPs that feature a different drummer, but I still wonder sometimes if I’m a bad person for listening to any of their stuff. I feel like I’m on firmer ethical ground with musically important but non-criminal bands from the Scandinavian region, such as Enslaved, Marduk, and At The Gates, but the truth is that any northern European band linked with the black metal scene has a better than even chance of having extreme right-wing ties.

That reality makes me uncomfortable, but I think I’m probably in the minority there. I feel like there are some black metal fans who feel the way I do, and some who just don’t care about the politics of the music they listen to (even if they do hold divergent political beliefs). But where most black metal fans, particularly fans in America, are concerned, I think a lot of them romanticize the right-wing beliefs of European black metal bands. In Lords Of Chaos: The Bloody Rise Of The Satanic Metal Underground, which is (sadly) probably the most authoritative black metal-related history currently extant, co-author Michael Moynihan gives a detailed sociological explanation for the movement towards right-wing political extremism in the Norwegian black metal underground. His contention, if I remember correctly (I don’t currently own a copy of the book), is that the liberal socialist society of late 20th century Scandinavia lead to widespread ennui amongst the youth of the region, and that the contrast between their society and that of their pagan Viking forefathers in centuries past made the idea of tearing down modern society in favor of a return to pre-Christian Scandinavian values quite attractive.

Moynihan’s theory makes a lot of sense; in fact, despite the political reality of the modern United States, which is far more repressive and draconian, and far less economically comfortable for the majority of its population, I see a lot of the same ennui and romantic interest in right-wing iconography and ideology in the upper-class white youth culture of the present-day United States—or at least in the extreme musical underground version of that culture. The advent of “mysterious guy hardcore” (which is a whole other story, one that I’ve wanted to tackle for quite a while, but is outside the purview of this article) has involved quite a bit of interest in the crypto-fascist right wing of the industrial noise scene, particularly focused on Whitehouse, a group I find truly repugnant. The fact that important socially-liberal issues of the past decades seem for the most part to be settled (at least from the upper-class white point of view) has inspired a rather ironic return within white youth culture to flirtation with, and sometimes even open advocacy of, racism, sexism, and other forms of intolerance towards those different from oneself.

By the way, it should be noted that Michael Moynihan has often been accused of advocating fascist beliefs himself, and though, after coyly refusing to take a stand in either direction throughout most of the 90s, he’s recently begun to openly reject fascist movements that he’s previously been linked to, his rejections often still bear the telltale tone of crypto-fascist beliefs. Which is to say, I do not trust the guy, and despite finding merit in his sociological theorizing within Lords Of Chaos, I do not share any of the tacit approval that is a textual undercurrent within that book. Just in case there was any doubt about that.

There are plenty of people who fit this sociological profile within the ranks of American black metal fans, and boy does Liturgy piss them the hell off. While Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s manifestos may be difficult to parse, quotes like one he recently gave to Spin, as part of a story by Christopher Weingarten about black metal bands who don’t fit the genre’s typical profile, make clear exactly what they hate about him: “Sometimes it feels like there were metalheads just waiting for this band to come along to hate it. Certain signifiers of looking a certain way and things are really meaningful to people. But it’s important to just do what you want to do, you know?” What’s fun is contrasting that quote with the article’s previous paragraph, which I will quote in full:

Idiosyncratic moves like this are the core of DIY, but in the insular, identity-crazed shred-o-verse, they cause headbangers like black metal misanthrope Wrest of Leviathan to get up in arms. “I’ve never farmed in my life and I don’t play a flute by a campfire,” he told Decibel in October, as he awaited trial for sexual assault. “That shit’s just corny. Black metal at the end of the day is about Satan and will always be about Satan. Black metal seems to be for hipsters with their girlfriend’s pants on nowadays.”

I admire Weingarten’s subtle insertion of the clause that I bolded, casually dropping in the fact that the person he’s quoting, who is going all-out to approve of black metal’s links to right-wing ideology, is also the sort of person that no halfway decent human being should want to be associated with. However, Wrest is a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I talk about extreme music fans who romanticize and fetishize right-wing iconography, and to understand just how perfect, you should all read up on exactly what he’s been charged with and what he’s had to say about it. A good place to start is Brandon Stosuy’s interview with him for Pitchfork, from September (note the dig at Liturgy in the answer to a question about defining black metal). Stosuy’s questions are softball-ish at times, but the interview was conducted over email, so I suppose if he’d been hard-hitting he might not have gotten any answers at all. I’d also direct you to the original print article on the crime, from the Chicago Sun-Times (who seemed to have no idea about Wrest/Whitehead’s musical career). Like a lot of the important figures on the early 90s Norwegian black metal scene, notably Burzum leader Varg Vikernes, Wrest comes off like a disturbed and dangerous individual. Regardless of any personal right-wing allegiances he (or Varg, for that matter) may have, he’s the sort of person you probably would want to have as little one-on-one contact with as possible.

And these are the sorts of people who find Liturgy most disturbing. For someone with my own political beliefs, that’s comforting, and at times even amusing. Some of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s more prominent quotes are flat-out trolling people like this, and I’m pretty sure he’s doing it intentionally. Regardless of how much I like Liturgy, I find it enjoyable to read quotes like this. And in light of how much pleasure I’ve gotten out of Aesthethica over the course of the past year, it is an outright joy to for once feel completely comfortable with a great black metal album.

11:48am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayFjQymr
(Notes: 19)
  
Filed under: Top 20 of 2011 
  1. bbredux reblogged this from bmichael and added:
    All of this. Manifestoes aside (trolling or not—I’m still not sure), I’m fascinated with the can of worms Liturgy has...
  2. bmichael reblogged this from andrewtsks and added:
    I really liked this whole post, for the most part. I liked the part excerpted above the most. For some reason, Liturgy’s...
  3. raptoravatar reblogged this from moneyfire
  4. moneyfire reblogged this from andrewtsks
  5. andrewtsks posted this