Band:	Twilight
Album:	III: Beneath Trident's Tomb
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	March 2014

01. Lungs
02. Oh Wretched Son
03. Swarming Funereal Mass
04. Seek No Shelter Fevered Ones
05. A Flood Of Eyes
06. Below Lights

When I heard tell of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore joining a black metal band, I was naturally curious and anxious to hear the results. Now... I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, because this sounds exactly like Sonic Youth playing black metal to me, and it sounds just as lame as I should have thought.

On their first two albums, Twilight played what was obviously and undeniably black metal. Decent, respectable black metal. I don't know what the hell this is. This sounds like a band of gypsies broke into my house and recorded themselves rummaging through my possessions. III: Beneath Trident's Tomb is a sludgy, grimy swamp-beast of an album, full of indistinct buzzing and droning. These are the sounds of a band revving up to go somewhere and then choking on the fumes before getting anywhere interesting. It's half-black metal with a weird indie vibe, lots of extra distortion, and no particular direction.

Somehow, I have managed to be disappointed and have my expectations fulfilled at the same time. I sit here drowning in the screeches, clangs, grunts, whistles, and filthy, feedback-y tumors of noise wondering how this experiment could have turned out so poorly, and every few seconds I realize that THIS is what it would sound like if Sonic Youth were to record a black metal album.

Twilight slipped pockets of black metal into the fuzzy custard of noise here and there, with blastbeats, growls, and even some vaguely black-ish sounding riffs dropping in for tea every now and again. I get the impression that they recorded some demos of real songs and then puttered about the studio for a few hours, knocking over instruments and creating feedback loops and layering that over the demos.

Don't think that I have anything against Sonic Youth, mind, or Thurston Moore in particular. These sounds just don't cohere. And I have to ask... what, pray, tell, WHAT is the deal with "Below Lights"? It sounds like I'm being driven to the outskirts of town in the clown car of the damned so I can get whacked by Sunn O))).

III: Beneath Trident's Tomb is annoying to listen to. Not only did it fail to deliver on a sort-of-promising experiment, but it fails to live up to Twilight's past efforts. Moreover, this is ostensibly Twilight's final album, so they must end their whole career on a bad note- or- a haze of screeching sounds that might qualify to some as a series of notes. It is boring, sometimes aggressively so. The phrase "swarming funeral mass" probably sums up the album sufficiently, and not in a good way.