Roads to Judah v. Aesthetica

v.
Hipsters have really been getting into black metal these days. I'm not quite sure what the draw is for them, but whatever it may be, they're finding their way into the more forward-thinking side of the genre, bringing far more major chords than we're used to with them. Two bands in particular have drawn my recent attention: Deafheaven and Liturgy.

When you see Deafheaven's band photo on Metal Archives, with the regular-looking guys in V-necks and button-up shirts with skateboards and a Che Guevara poster in the background, your hipster alarm should go off immediately. The cover art to their first full-length, Roads to Judah, isn't helping much either, resembling as it does the art accompanying Final Fantasy VI (formerly III in the US). Nor is the last review of it I read, which called it "extremely hip". I dared it anyway, despite my past bad experiences with post-metal, because what I heard intrigued me.


The first four minutes of the album did not bode well. Gentle drumming and pretty, shimmering guitar chords. It sounds like that crap album Anathema released last year. But afterwards, things definitely start to get better. They speed up into a full-on tremolo picking assault, with extremely aggressive drumming. The vocals are entirely in a generic (but good) black metal rasp--no clean singing here. All four songs are well-composed, with the gradual evolution, subtlety, and balance appropriate to post-metal. It's aggressive as hell, 90% of the time, but it still manages to sound pretty, like some kind of delicate flower filled with deadly poison. It gives the music a morose but still angry emotional texture. The drumming is far more engaging than most post-black metal tends to be. It's aggressive even more often than the guitar, with plenty of fills and a wide variety of blasts.

There are some downsides of course. Honestly you won't notice the bass most of the time, and since the guitars stay in the higher range there's very little heaviness to be found. The middle two songs are excellent, but the beginning of the opener and most of the closer sound like hipster bullshit, right up through the piano outro.



Compare to Liturgy. Their band photo should not only trigger your hipster alarm, but also your gag reflex. But let's try to listen with our ears again, shall we? Their style has sometimes been called "transcendental" black metal, supposedly intended to draw you to a higher state of consciousness (or some similar bullshit) through repetition. There's plenty of dissonance to go along with the major chords, and all the vocals are screechy. The drums are pretty generic and boring, but I could get past that. The album opens with some glitch-like sounds, and goes into the excellent "High Gold". But after that point, everything goes downhill. Your first hint would be the ridiculous clean singing at the beginning of "True Will", but then the jubilant mood of "Returner" proves that everything's out of whack.

Metal has never been accused of being pretentious; usually, it's accused of being juvenile. This album is pretentious. "Generation" is 7 minutes of what's basically one riff repeated over and over, without vocals. But "Sun of Light" really drives the "we think we're capital-A Artists" point home, with its extended screw-off tangent and, to cap it off, 45 seconds of silence in the middle of the fucking album. By the time "Glory Bronze" comes on, I felt like I was watching some ridiculous piece of "performance art". And you have to hear the annoying a capella of "Glass Earth" to believe it.



The Verdict: I find in favor of Deafheaven. People you don't normally think of as metalheads can bring new blood to the genre. If a hipster is anything like the guys in Deafheaven--regular guys who want to try out some forward-thinking black metal--I'll welcome them to the fold. Roads to Judah gets 3.5 out of 5 stars. But if a hipster is more like the guys in Liturgy, with a full-blown sense of irony and casual superiority, then they can rot. 1 out of 5 stars for Aesthetica.