Band:	Liturgy
Album:	The Ark Work
Style:	Experimental black metal
Release date:	March 24, 2015
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Fanfare
02. Follow
03. Kel Valhaal
04. Follow II
05. Quetzalcoatl
06. Father Vorizen
07. Haelegen
08. Reign Array
09. Vitriol
10. Total War

If I had a time machine, I wouldn't use it to kill Hitler. I wouldn't introduce Abraham Lincoln to the concept of bodyguards. No, I wouldn't teach Columbus how to play nice or derail the First World War or punch Enver Pasha in the face. I would use it to stop this album from being made.

Remember when Deafheaven released Sunbather and stirred up a massively idiotic hurricane of controversy over the blasphemous notion of "happy black metal"? If you asked a deaf person to describe for the Dalai Lama the most extreme criticisms that befell Deafheaven and then recorded an album based on what the Dalai Lama explained to you through interpretive dance, The Ark Work is the brass-suffocated, painfully bright, vaguely introspective, godawfully repetitive, rough-approximation-of-shoegaze-fed-through-a-wood-chipper-and-reconstituted-into-a-black-metal-type-abrasive-music-album thing that you would probably produce.

Liturgy herald the arrival of their latest work with the flattest, most artificial, most obnoxious horns in the history of recorded music. Never before have I actually gotten a serious headache from trying to push through a single album. I don't think it would be much of an exaggeration to say that the first 13 minutes of The Ark Work could be considered a war crime so heinous that the Hague would sooner remand this album to the custody of Josef Mengele than allow it to be played in the presence of decent, hard-working folk. I have listened to plenty of worse albums over the years, but nothing - NOTHING - matches those bloody, godawful horns in terms of pure, unfathomable irritation. Meanwhile, the vocals wandering tragically in the background sound like the strange hiccups of sound that people mistook for satanic messages back in the 1970s when they played their Judas Priest records backwards.

What, truthfully, is so bad about The Ark Work? The digital effects are hammered in awkwardly, vomiting pointlessly-computerized vocal tracks and ambient sounds all over the place. The songs are aimless, undefined, cannibalistic, meandering, and nonsensical. The production is abhorrently mishandled to such an impressive degree that the person responsible must, in fact, be a two-by-four with a face scrawled on one end in semi-congealed lamb's blood. Dead-eyed, monotonous vocals skip and twitter and flummox and dither about like an AI having a seizure. Jangling guitars plagued by an overage of bright, post-y, gaze-y cheeriness bludgeon the same boring passages into your ears over and over and over again, like a relentlessly chipper coworker who refuses to leave you a single moment of unassailed silence. A pig horking up its own stomach lining onto a balalaika could create a more polished and meaningful piece of music.

Listening to this album is like being tied to a the front of a moving train and having monkeys throw water balloons full of Ceaușescu's spinal fluid and rusty Communist AIDS at you from a motorcycle speeding alongside. This is a true musical migraine. "Vitriol" might actually be the worst song of 2015. I can't continue to write. This album has killed me.