Twilight Muse Release “A Moment Out of Time”

Muscularity is hard to find in modern rock, no matter what part of the world you’re looking for it. Thankfully, there are still a couple of bands like the New York outfit Twilight Muse that are working to keep the flame of true rock alive, and in the album A Moment Out of Time, we get an up-close and personal look at what that flame can do when there’s nothing to extinguish the blaze. Out of the box, A Moment Out of Time has a standard post-punk/alternative rock vibe, but upon closer inspection, it reveals itself to be a painstakingly emotional effort untethered to corporate trends.

You don’t have to be a pro to pick up on the new wave influences in this record, specifically in songs like “Electrify Me” and “Are You In?,” but I don’t think anything in the tracklist qualifies as a throwback to the ’80s. There’s nothing unoriginal about the organic tonality of the string play in “Electrify Me,” and as cuttingly raw as the main melody in “Oh Mama” is, it isn’t enough to convince me that anything but a simplistic artistic premise was used to process the concept. Twilight Muse has too much to say to dabble in artificialities, and that’s partially why they’ve got my attention this summer.

I dig the unexpected punch to the groove of “Dreamspace” and the slow-churning “Audacious,” and had these two tracks not been adorned with as much oomph, I don’t know that they would have stuck out as much as they did in their present form. A lot of this record’s chest-beating comes in forms that we would never anticipate it taking – a swinging bassline, an understated percussive pattern, even the lingering feedback of a seemingly acoustic guitar – and you don’t have to be a hardcore fan of rock music to get swept up in the unadulterated adrenaline it induces.

The conceptualism we discover in “Forever,” “Destination You” and “Oh Mama” is incredible, but it’s got nothing on the calm center that the lead vocal is. The instrumentation forms a typhoon out of nowhere in A Moment Out of Time, but it’s frequently when the band is raging the hardest that we get to feel the singer’s vulnerability without any additional emotional facets. Serious thought went into the structure of this LP, and if it’s any indication as to how Twilight Muse will continue to operate, they’re going to break the mainstream in no time.

For those who believed that rock n’ roll was somehow on the downswing in 2023, you need to consider A Moment Out of Time by Twilight Muse and urgent listen. The soundtrack of summer is typically defined by those few acts that are willing to borrow as much from the icons as they do their contemporaries, but in this case, it’s coming from an independent beat made up of artists like Twilight Muse, whose efforts here and in the collective New York beat could qualify them for many well-recognized accolades come the end of the year.

Nicole Killian