Liturgy - 'Renihilation'

Hipsters attempt to climb black metal parapets; get crushed by hooves of the devil.

Liturgy’s Renihilation debut almost reeks of hipster irony. This thing stinks to high heaven and could only have been unearthed in Brooklyn. “Indie Black Metal” they call it, as if we didn’t have enough ridiculous terms to contend with these days. The resulting noise is exactly that: an excuse for the self-congratulatory back-slappers to try their hand at the “underground.”

While I’m not too personally biased/miffed against this sort of practice when it’s done right, I can call a spade when I see one. In Liturgy’s case, the quartet fails in a musical sense: as in they’re just not very good. Where a band such as Wolves In The Throne Room succeeds both conceptually and musically in their attempts to bridge indie ideals with blasphemous BM, Liturgy fail from the get-go with their inept and unoriginal attempts at a Nattens Madrigal photocopy.

The guitar work of Bernard Gann and the so-ludicrous-it’s-just-got-to-be-a-pseudonym Hunter Hunt-Hendrix revels in lo-fi, yet does so inadequately with an equally (in)offensive wink and nudge to the genre it’s supposed to be mimicking. In other words, even with the band’s Colin Marston at the producers helm, Krallice this band is not. While Triple H’s (ugh) howl is desperate enough, the bulk of Renihilation is vague discordance, bereft of the necessary atmosphere or imagination needed to push an idea like this through the so-often closed-minds of the black metal subculture.

Ultimately, it proves difficult to separate the musical merits—or lack thereof— Renihilation possesses from the disingenuousness perpetrated by this album’s aura. Luckily, this writer doesn’t have to, because Liturgy just isn’t up to snuff. If you’re searching for something unique in the black metal world, go out and purchase the new Glorior Belli, and leave this to the hipsters who will probably grow tired of it in a few weeks.