Dead Twilight have put the whole of Totentanz up to hear. The album came out on 30 October through Great Dane Records and is the fourth full length by a band that started in Palermo in 2004 and now works out of Pavia and Genoa.
The structure is the interesting part. Five of the eight tracks are German phrases for a manner of death: the natural death, the sudden death, the ritual death, art death, the personified death. Von Hypnos und Thanatos follows, naming the twin brothers of sleep and death from Greek myth, and the record closes with Al Quds in two parts.
A dance of death is one of the oldest images in European art, a procession in which everyone goes whatever their rank, and a brutal death metal band naming each figure in the procession is doing something more deliberate than picking grim song titles.
Musically this is the Italian school of brutal death that has little patience for atmosphere. Their previous record, Fall of Humanity, arrived in 2023, with a compilation and the single Legion filling the gap since.