I was fourteen years old when my step father bought me a copy of Faith No More’s Angel Dust. It was a cassette that I had anticipated for such a long time. I had stood reading about it in magazines at a local news agent. I scanned the cover for hints of the music, the delicate white curves of the heron on the rich blue background. When I played that cassette for the first time, somewhere during the first track, “Land of Sunshine”, I fell asleep. Upon waking I had memorized the whole of Side A. I rewound to listen again after dinner. On second listen, I was disturbed to learn that what I had listened to was a Faith No More album generated by my mind as I slept. Quite simply, a dream. And with each minute I listened while conscious, the dream version was erased until all that remained was a memory of something different. Angel Dust continues to be one of my favourite albums ever. However, every time I listen, I am reminded of the album I lost.
Sometimes I think that Twilight’s Monument to Time End is that album. Not that they sound the same but rather they are of the same dreamscape. Produced and performed by a veritable who’s who of American black metal and a step away from the debut and toward a more accessible direction, Monument is akin to being enveloped someone else’s dream. It is a vortex of incomprehensible anguish reverberating and swirling, a sonorous weeping and a guiltless mutilation of conceptual corpses. None of it is readily explainable yet it all makes sense, just as in a dream, where things simply are.
Monument has a vinyl release on Southern Lord for a reasonable price
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