Twilight

Monument To Time End

Southern Lord 2010

The black metal supergroup Twilight is an amalgam of members from various projects such as Nachtmystium, Leviathan, Krieg, and Isis among others.  After a disappointing debut album Twilight have regrouped (literally) and forged their skills and talents into an alloy of unbreakable Satanic steel.  Bizarre sonic textures phase into the opening of the doom laden passages of The Cryptic Ascension.  A sense of time and space permeate the riffs and permutations of melancholy breathe within the notes of the melodies.  All this eventually collapses into frigid Nordic blasting riffs leaving the listener frozen.  All this within the first track. Spacey ambience glares down upon a stark guitar and washed out whispers on Fall Behind Eternity.   Then a radiation burst of cyclopean black metal streams out from this abyssic void to rape my ears with astral darkness.  Soon we are showered with the industrial-esque beats and towering synth of Red Fields which drifts further into the cosmic deep, leaving me with a sense of wonder and dread.  Alternative space-rock fleshes out the latter stages of the track.  Convulsions in Wells of Fever is a fairly straight-forward black metal track, rooted in tradition and is likely the least experimental of the compositions found here.  The album ends its transmission with Negative Signal Omega.  A slow, hammering beat and desolate synths paint a bleak landscape of uncaring isolation.  slowly ebbing choirs dance against shrill yet faded black metal shrieks.  The track is a bleak and unfeeling march into deaths cruel embrace.  Monument To Time End is an altogether different beast than the debut album.  It is a many different headed hydra, as so many musical variations originate from the body of this blackened monstrosity.  Monument is a confident, expressive and dare I say adventurous album that still manages to draw its essence from icy black metal foundations.