When Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore joined black metal super-group Twilight, he was quoted as saying “We’re not coming together to make music, we’re joining forces to destroy all rational thought”. Now, with Twilight III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb, the band has pretty much done that. Problem is, the destruction of all rational thought is way less interesting than I assumed it would be. Apparently when you look beneath the tomb of a trident, you get a lot of unlistenable noise and screaming. Woo hoo, pass the beer nuts.
Part of the issue comes from the loss of Natchmystium’s Blake Judd, and the rumor that large chunks of this album written by Judd were scrapped. I don’t know if that’s cold hard fact, but it would go a long way to explaining why this album sounds like a disjointed mess. Twilight bounce from industrial, to depressive black metal to just plain noise, with all the connective power of a child off their meds. I understand the idea of creating intensely harsh, disconnected music that tests our ability to see art within the chaos, but this isn’t that. Beneath Trident’s Tomb comes across like ideas just smashed together, as if the band figured with enough chaos, nobody would figure out just how incoherent it is.
Part of what makes experimental noise and even black metal so intriguing, is that to those who don’t listen to it, it all does sound the same. These are genres that exist almost entirely to challenge the audience. If you face the challenge long enough, you begin to pick up traits, small details, things that allow you to separate the good from the bad in a genre that most hear and run screaming into the night. Twilight make good on the confrontational part, but not on the rest. Their noise generates no interest, which is the death knell for any band putting out this style of music.
As for the addition of Thurston Moore, well, that’s exactly what it sounds like. Twilight added Thurston Moore. Nothing on Beneath Trident’s Tomb transcends that idea, so the additions become meaningless, another layer of eye-rolling “noise” added to a cup already overflowing. There are many reactions to an album like this, but never should one of them be ambivalence.
Beneath Trident’s Tomb is a lot like Grandpa Simpson. There’s yelling, noise, a bunch of incoherent ramblings, and then, ultimately, you fall asleep.
