Timeghoul Panaramic Twilight
1994; Self-Released
One thing
that I tend to look for more on a band’s demos than on their official releases,
and this goes double for bands who never make it out of the demo stage but find
some form of notoriety in spite of that, is confidence. Does the band know
where it’s heading, or are they still playing with the proportions of their
various influences? Is there reason to expect that this band will grow into
something notable, or are they hesitant enough in their moves towards
individuality that they might never escape the label of rip-off? In short, is
the material that the band’s putting forth as its calling card good enough to
convince me to pay attention to anything they might do in the future? I can
ignore a whole host of demo-specific issues – thin sound, bad balance of
instruments, hissy overtones – if the band’s material is strong enough to draw
me into whatever world they’re creating, and if they can’t manage that then
those issues tend to overshadow anything good they might be doing otherwise.
Timeghoul got
about halfway away from that sandpit on their second demo. What the band are
doing is interesting – even more so when you consider that they’re from the
death metal hotbed that is Missouri – even though it can easily be summed up as
some slightly doomier variant on what Demilich were doing around this time.
There are obviously more influences in play here though, and it works to the
EP’s advantage. I hear echoes of everyone from Gorguts (those warping,
discordant riffs) to Voivod (the sci-fi lyrics) to dISEMBOWELMENT (the crushing
doom of some passages) to Entombed (the brief snippets of lead guitar) to the
aforementioned Demilich, but I don’t just hear a stew of those parts. Well not
always at least. The times that Timeghoul work their warring elements in a way
that actually coalesces – this is more the case on “Boiling in the Hourglass”
than on “Occurrence on Mimas” – are truly exciting, an elegant balance of
heaviness, weirdness and atmosphere that few bands have managed to pull off as
well even with better production. The times that it doesn’t gel together as
well aren’t a slog by any means, but they lack the promise, the confidence,
that those moments possess and can’t help but feel inferior for it.
It needs to
be said though that the moments where things to come together are quite
something. The times when the band locks into a riff that’s just off enough to
unbalance the track but not so much as to upend it completely. The times when
two seemingly unrelated sections of a given track are transitioned perfectly
into each other, almost mocking you for thinking they wouldn’t work next to one
another. The times when the band’s conceptual lean rears its head without
calling attention to itself. These moments are the mark of a band that knows
exactly what it wants to do and has the skills to pull it off, and they’re
frequent enough to make me mourn the fact that this was the last thing that
these guys put together. They’re not frequent enough to give Panaramic Twilight anything more than a
heavily conditional recommendation, but their presence is certainly enough to
keep me listening through the rougher patches.
The bottom
line though is that unlike the rest of their contemporaries in the USDM scene
(as it were) in the 90s, Timeghoul were at least trying to do something
different with their sound. It may not have been wholly original, but looking
through the other noted metal releases from 1994 I’m hard pressed to find any
that try half as hard as Panaramic
Twilight to push some boundaries. Call this a tip of the hat towards my
love of noble failure over something that plays it safe to objectively better
effect, but I like that there’s at least an effort to move away from the tried
and true death metal tropes here even when it doesn’t quite work. I hate to
give the band extra points solely for individuality, but since it’s that
individuality that makes Panaramic
Twilight somewhat enjoyable it’s worth noting at least. [6.2]
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