Now in stock on vinyl, released in a limited edition of 500 copies in a gorgeous foil-stamped jacket...

I know that there's been lots of buzz on message boards and blogs about the shady Black Twilight Circle, a group of inter-related black metal bands from Southern California that have loosely gathered together in a manner reminiscent of the notorious Les Legions Noires from France, but over here on the East Coast, I've been totally oblivious to the music that this small, incestuous circle of black metal bands has been producing. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this new reissue of Dolorvotre's tape that originally came out on Crepusculo Negro is the first Black Twilight related piece of music I've heard. Released by Ajna on cd with an eight page booklet in an edition of three hundred copies, this disc is both pretty weird and pretty malevolent, and it has certainly stirred my interest in finding more from the Circle...

The album starts with a hallucinatory intro of swirling cloudy reverb, strings, reverb-drenched minor key arpeggios, distant tortured howling and eerie choral moans, but when it goes into the song "Brilliant Brightness", we're treated to a slow, shambling slightly out-of-tune blackened dirge; loose and shambling, not exactly sloppy, but definitely quite damaged and demented. This creeping dissonant trudge then breaks off into a mix of stomping mid-tempo black metal and slightly faster thrashing, simple catchy leads trailing off as the drums burst into thunderous double-bass and odd spastic stop/start parts. There's some heavy phasing effect used on the vocals that contribute to the delirious feel of Dolorvotre's black metal, giving you the impression you're listening to this album through a head full of cough syrup; those vocals sound truly fucked up, layered screams and groans bathed in a variety of effects, with heavy use of phaser and flanging effects that shoot the hellish howls into the upper atmosphere. The songs that follow keep moving through these druggy, slow shambling dirges and passages of blasting frenzy, and the guitars have this strange chiming, atonal jangle that reminds me of the off-kilter guitar sound of bands like Ved Buens Ende and Laetitia In Holocaust.

The harrowing chaos of "DMT" and blazing mid-tempo "Worship Black Twilight" shift into an eerie instrumental acoustic guitar interlude that appears halfway through the album, then picks back up with the soaring melodic "Treasure Of Sin", it's majestic lead guitars swarming over a chaotic blast beat and murky undertow, slowing down into a rocking, amazingly catchy riff that embeds itself immediately in your brain. "Carrion Of Immorality" is much faster, ramshackle blasting and weird howling that's more sinister in tone than the previous song but still exudes that majestic feeling, moving between a number of different melodies and buzzing jangly riffs, leading into the similar blasting frenzy of "LSD" and the ending instrumental outro, where the album drifts off into the sound of ghostly wailing and mandolin-like strings and shuffling percussion.