An almost obligated question Metalheads love to make themselves/each other: "Who would play in your dream band?" Most of times the answer to this question includes an amount of “stars” that is so over the top we think that not even in our wildest dreams it will happen.

For whatever reason one of these wild dreams has come true. Fans of the American Black Metal "scene" will be marveled to learn that Malefic (Xasthur), Azentrius (Nachtmystium), Wrest (Leviathan), Imperial (Krieg) and Hildolf (Draugar) have joined forces in this project, Twilight. Pretty impressive huh?

After eagerly waiting, the Twilight album is finaly here and considering the complication of an all “star” project - especially when the project involves people who work all alone (all the bands are one man projects) - I think the result was more of a hit than a miss, but it still feels quite lackluster.

The band sounds like a balance between Xasthur, Leviathan, Krieg and Nachtmystium, mixing the dream like, atmospheric elements of the first two mentioned bands with the more straight forward orientation of the later two. Although this sounds great on theory, it wasn’t exploited to the max in my humble opinion. Why? Well, I think that the highlights, or what makes each band unique, was left off and only the backbone elements were conserved for the album. Leviathan’s progressive approach is lacking, Krieg’s brutality too and so forth, thing which is a shame because they have enough elements to produce something better. The result? A collection of songs which lack personality. Now, there are some really killer songs in the album (White Fire Under Black Text for example), but most of the time the album feels too linear to me and that’s a bit of a disappointment.

Another element that made the album less enjoyable was the production, not because of how raw it is (although some people seem to find to raw for their taste), but because at some moments it sounds a bit watered down and weak.

Fans of the musicians involved probably have already checked it out (if not hurry ‘cause it’s limited to 2,000 copies) and if not I think you will find it at least a bit interesting (though all the individual projects are better); people not into ‘em or the USBM scene can easily skip this album.

An interesting concept not developed in the best way it could have been. I still want to hear the next one because if there are musicians with talent and capacity out there it’s the ones in Twilight.