Liturgy might be the most polarizing band in metal. If you aren’t steeped in all of metal’s melodrama and scene politics (and why should you be?!), then nothing about this Brooklyn black metal band is going to strike you as controversial, especially considering all the inverted crosses, gore and Anal Cunts that can be found elsewhere. The ’heads don’t like Liturgy because they look like a bunch of hipster Johnny-come-latelies to black metal, not that such a thing should matter all that much. Frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix does himself no favors by giving insufferably pretentious interviews and having the name Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, but plenty of black-metallers are insufferably pretentious and call themselves things like Fortress Crookedjaw. And while you can do a lot better than Liturgy’s
Aesthethica, you can also do a lot worse than the Meshuggah-does-black-metal off-kilterness of a song like “Generation.”
— Matt Sullivan