Twilight
Monument To Time End

Twilight. The line-up alone would be enough to adequately comment on this album, but a mere list, however esteemed, would not do justice to the intensity and greatness of these songs, so balanced between metallic orthodoxy and post-rock experimentation.

The first album of this USBM all-star band was all about preserving the genre, pure and simple fuel to ignite the black flame. Memorable, certainly, but not for its defiant originality.

This "Monument," aided by changes within the group, still guided by the dark triad of Blake Judd, Wrest, and Imperial, is a bastard, equidistant from black as it is from post-core, but undeniably the offspring of both. And this combination is certainly not the easiest to conceive, execute, and control.

But things are clear here from the first notes of the opener "The cryptic ascension", dangerously in the Isis, Minsk zone, but interpreted by an intense Imperial, black on black background.
Even more lysergic and sidereal is the subsequent "Fall behind eternity", with a dark guitar arpeggio that then flows into rhythms crossing Neurosis and Leviathan.

Each track of this work develops independently, following invisible paths that suddenly open into soundscapes that leave you momentarily bewildered. You don't easily find yourself among these notes, and that is a great virtue, for the interpretative freedom it encompasses.
This is what black should be able to be (among other things) in 2010.
Devastating.