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Dec 9, 2011It may come to define or utterly transcend metal; but it doesn't matter because this album is in its own class. Anyone remotely interested in heavy music needs to encounter Aesthethica at least once.
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May 16, 2011Aesthethica is inventive, alive, and shrieking with more ideas than many bands explore over an entire career.
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May 16, 2011It's challenging at first, yes, but most importantly, it's inclusive and ultimately uplifting, tossing genre bias aside in favor of several moments of--deal with it, metal sourpusses--pure transcendence.
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May 17, 2011Stacked against its predecessor, Aesthethica feels less like metal-black, post-, or otherwise--and more like Liturgy. And in this case, that's a great thing.
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May 16, 2011Repurposing tired metal tropes for ecstatic sensory trips, these songs are steel-tipped pointillist portraits of vitality itself.
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May 16, 2011The band's aching for that contradictory limit can be felt quivering in every inch of Aesthetica. It is to their credit that one feels at peace through the record's most violent and cataclysmic moments.
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Jun 16, 2011It's black metal for prog fans or math rockers, Liturgy's attention to arrangement and speed the sort of maddeningly precise output nerds like that eat up.
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May 16, 2011It's sonically assaultive, a riot of full-sprint drumming--by Greg Fox, increasingly this band's central nervous system--and guitar lines with the spasmodic precision of strobe lighting. But aside from the bleached gut-howl of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, and the dark ritual the band so purposely invokes, the music doesn't fall cleanly within black-metal parameters.
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May 16, 2011Aesthethica is jugular-grabbing black metal-startling, complex... and also quite long.
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May 16, 2011There's no let-up, no pretty acoustic interludes, just full-on musical onslaught.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 14 out of 15
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Mixed: 0 out of 15
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Negative: 1 out of 15
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May 30, 2012
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Dec 31, 2011