For anyone facing this issue in the future, for the command line build make sure your JAVAHOME is set to JDK v8:

JAVAHOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_112

Or where ever your 1.8 JDK is. It is a beast and sucks up memory but it was the only way to get around this build error. I would NOT recommend that you build in Android Studion with 1.8 since it seems to require Jack which is just plain slow. And sadly it is deprecated to boot.