Live Review : Liturgy + Dawn Ray'd @ Soup, Manchester on October 11th 2022

For many years Black Metal has been at war with itself about the sanctity and purity of the genre. There are those that believe anything that deviates from the Nordic template of Satanic adoration is heretical and has no place appropriating the mantle of Black Metal. However, there is another camp that believes Black Metal is a style rather than an ideology and like any musical genre it is ripe for evolution. This section believes Black Metal has a power and evocativeness that goes far beyond an obsession with old nick and therefore can be used to soundtrack any manner of subject matter. 

Dawn Ray’d are cases in point as they have taken the nihilism of Black Metal and highly politicalised it. They are using its harsh but passionate tones to fight our oppressive overlords and to extol the benefits of anarchism. Righteous anger and contempt flows through their material and there is a punk like urgency and antagonism to their approach. But this isn’t just rage for rage’s sake, they are funnelling their wrath in a proactive manner and urging us to unify and collectively bring down the system. This call to arms makes Dawn Ray’d feel distinctly different from other Black Metal purveyors, as does Simon B’s mournful violin. The Violin and extremity are not usual easy bedfellows but the ferocity that springs forward from this usually sedate instrument is extraordinary. 

As I have said tonight is all about re-imaging Black Metal and in Dawn Ray’d’s hands it has become a clarion call for the forthcoming revolution. Freed from its dodgier associations it has been repurposed as a method to strike against all manner of bigotry and fittingly the final track is dedicated to anarchists, anti-fascists and all those fighting for women’s right and trans rights. Corrosive and utterly captivating, this is the sound of the uprising.

Liturgy are for all intents and purposes Hunter Hunt-Hendrix and she has been at the forefront of re-inventing Black Metal since her teens. She published a philosophical treatise in 2009 "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism",  extolling the virtues of the musical form as an aid to understand the minutia of existence. As the leader and the force behind Liturgy (and at numerous points the sole musical contributor) she has produced five quite stunning albums that have pushed the boundaries of what we understand to be music and challenged our linear grasp on song structure. This is Black Metal as meditative aid, if of course your idea of meditation involves great swathes of relentless noise. To fully engage with Liturgy, you need to free yourself of conformity and convention. This is transcendental in that it helps you see beyond the mundane. There is a spiralling relentlessness to the unremitting guitar. Rather than deal in sporadic riffs, theirs is a cacophony of circular refrains that drill down into the human consciousness.

But rather than being a downbeat and dirgy,  this is actually an upbeat and highly positive experience. You see the norm in Black Metal is to have everything underproduced and down tuned. Nothing soars and there is no space for euphoric refrains. The exact opposite is however true for Liturgy’s approach. It might be a contorting maelstrom of repeating noise but it crescends upwards, creating a great upswell of rhythmic intensity that you can not help but become lost in. It’s this intensity that is crucial, as at times it does feel like being inside a pressure cooker. But that very much is the point. Art shouldn’t be easy. It should be redemptive and life altering but it shouldn’t be easily consumed. Liturgy tonight are utterly impenetrable, but also simultaneously utterly restorative and utterly incredible.

We get three tracks from the extraordinary “Aesthethica” (from the reaction the tracks get, many of the crowd’s entry point into Hunter’s warped world), three from 2019 surprise release “H.A.Q.Q.” and a single (but lengthy) taster of what is to come from next year’s “93696” but lets be honest this isn’t about individual songs (and we are stretching the definition here). This is all about the aesthetic and the atmosphere. All seven tracks aired bond together to create a cloud of tumultuous sonic intensity that assimilates all around it. The closest I can come is that this was a apocalyptic strength sound bath, stripping away our fears and baptising us in pure noise. Quite unlike anything else, but absolutely secure in its uniqueness. This indeed was a transcendental experience. Disturbing but enlightening, Challenging music at its very very best.  

Check the “In The Flesh” page for more photos!