Monday, May 24, 2010

Into the Depths of Twilight

I've been rocking out to a lot of black metal recently - the Odem Arcarum album I mentioned a few weeks ago, the Ludicra album everyone but me discovered three months ago, the new Keep of Kalessin - but the one that's been the biggest surprise success for me is Monuments to Time's End by the unfortunately-named Twilight. A black metal supergroup of sorts and fronted by Nachtmystium's Blake Judd, Twilight's been a surprise stalwart for me because it's so much of a throwback to the halcyon days of low-fi second wave black metal, a genre that I find more academically interesting than praiseworthy, in part because I am not a low-fi sort of guy. There's something different about Twilight, however and it's taken me a few listens to figure out why that difference appeals to me. After my first listen of Monument..., I felt like I had just been through an Experience (definitely with a capital E) that did not generate any specific positive or negative emotions, but was enough for me to give the album another try. On each additional listen something new has jumped out at me: a guitar line floating here, a dissonant chorus rising like a monolith in the background there, but the whole album remains a stormy sea of sounds that keeps calling me back to explore its depths. I embedded a track below for you to check out, but unlike the majority of my selections it's a random sample rather than a representative one. I'm going back in to see what else I can find.

1 comment:

Bardo said...

I picked this up 2 weeks ago.
"8,000 years" will be played at my viking funeral.