Twilight - 'Monument To Time End'

A near flawless example of black metal in 2010.

It’s been a long five years since the self-titled debut from black metal’s hyped and acclaimed ‘supergroup’ was unleashed to mild fanfare in 2005. However, while Twilight delivered the meat-and-potatoes goods—birthed from the brows of USBM’s most malevolent sons—the affair as a whole didn’t quite deliver on the promised quality, particular when considering the talent of its respective songwriters.

Monument to Time End is a whole new animal, however, bringing in some new blood in the form of Isis’ Aaron Turner, Minsk’s Sanford Parker and Stavros Giannopolous from The Atlas Moth, who join band founders Wrest of Leviathan, Imperial from Krieg and Blake Judd from Nachtmystium to unleash some REAL hell upon the masses.

While the relative shakiness of Twilight shouldn’t be placed firmly upon the feet of its former contributors (Xasthur’s Malefic and Hildolf of Draugar), the plain and simple truth is that Monument  shames its predecessor in terms of quality, serving as a righteous rebirth for a project which has clearly ARRIVED in 2010.

The focus of Monument To Time End is massive indeed, and speaks wonders of this lineup’s collective talent. The subtle influx of Turner, Parker and Giannopolous—creative wild cards in a deck filled with black metal aces—is evident from the get-go on this album, filling in the gaps between Twilight’s satanic metal base with thick, viscous globs of metalgaze melody and electronic discordance. Elsewhere on the album, Wrest, Imperial and Judd all lay down some of their best performances in recent memory, gelling together with their new band mates with utter perfection.

This album provides a seemingly limitless set of ideas to the listener, all of which are taking the concepts of black metal—a nebulous, universal solvent—and pushing them ever-forward, straight into the upper echelon of supposed ‘all star’ projects. Monument to Time End exposes new layers of its sinister soundscape with each successive listen, and is destined to rank high upon most writers’ year end lists come December.

Defying all pre-conceived notions of black metal ‘purity’ and ‘essence’, Twilight could probably care less whether or not the scene feels its existence is ‘true’ or not, but the unabashed truth is: they are indeed The Real Deal.

Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.