The Ark Work

Their music isn’t for everybody, but those who enjoy musical adventurism would do well to give The Ark Work a try. Even if you hate it, you certainly won’t be bored. For those of us who are already on board, this is an exciting next step from Aesthetica, and it will be interesting to see where they can possibly go from here.

The Ark Work is best at its most explorative rather than its most punishing.

This is captivatingly repetitive music that grabs the listener by the throat and drags him into a higher aural and indeed emotional plane.

The Ark Work pays tribute to Hunt-Hendrix’s dogged desire to push listeners’ buttons. Sure, this could all be a massive wind-up, but to these ears Liturgy seem to have melted down the traditional ingredients of black metal and crafted it into something unyielding, unique and ultimately engrossing.

It's catchy without sacrificing heft. It's a behemoth, but also sounds meditative. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to compromise so much as heartily invite the genres it dives into.

Mr. Hunt-Hendrix is a feckless, floppy-voiced singer, and either for reasons of safety or rigor he often sticks to a single tone organized into rhythmic phrasing. The monotony can become crazy-making. And sometimes these songs become facile and grandiose.... But the band knows its virtues and works them hard: density, repetition, development, perversity, integration, catharsis.

The result is often challenging, occasionally rapturous, and always without peer.

As heavy-handed and impenetrable as that philosophy might seem, The Ark Work is still triumphant and interesting enough musically to keep fans satisfied.

The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of list For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends.

With repeated listens, though, the insistent aural assault actually reveals some good ideas, but it’s hard to imagine anyone frequently listening to The Ark Work for pleasure.

There are missteps--the tinny horns of "fanfare," or the mantra of "Vitriol," which is silly in the same way Kula Shaker were silly. Straighter Moments hit, though, largely thanks to drummer Greg Fox's athletic disposition and some mighty crescendos. [May 2015, p.76]

When they're good, they are astounding, and almost impossible to adequately describe. When they miss the mark, though, this lot grate. [7 Mar 2015, p.54]

The demand for our awe at an accomplished--yet unfinished--triumph is confusing. The feeling each song inspires is indeed that of a religious service, one in which the endless standing up and sitting down leaves one a little exasperated. And fatigued.

Ultimately, it frustrates because the listener doesn't get much in the way of reward for the chore of endurance.

It's a series of blows that fail to connect.... Taken on its own terms, divorced from the genre to which it owes its existence The Ark Work's dogged pursuit of incongruous juxtaposition can be hugely entertaining. [Apr 2015, p.53]

There are times in which The Ark Work sounds aimless in spite of its slight technical achievements, yielding a sensory overload of strobing compositions channeled with unrestrained imagination.

It’s considerably more difficult to listen to than ‘Aesthetica’--the vocals often sound like a skipping CD--and largely forsakes that album’s triumphal feel for grating noise mash-ups (“Follow” and “Follow II”), angular electro jams (“Quetzalcoatl”) and synthetic horns (“Fanfare”).

The Ark Work is certainly not black metal. The problem is that it’s really not much else, either. Indeed, even after repeated listens, it comes across not so much as an album but as a sort of formless mass, which could be a good thing, in the right hands, but here does little more than baffle and exasperate.