Twilight and Thunderstorms

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*Twilight and thunderstorms* is the seventh official album released by Billy Hill & The Optimists, appearing between *Solar eclipse on a March evening,* an album made of extras from Twilight which was released alongside it, and *Mental collapse nervous breakdown*. Twilight and thunderstorms is the second album in the Barriers trilogy. Twilight further explores themes and sounds presented in *Fiberglass and flowers*, the previous album in its trilogy, leaning more towards a connected experience, the music being made with the stories in mind similarly to *Inserenity and infernos* as a pose to the stories coming afterwards for Fiberglass, which seems to have a negative effect on the sound. It was created by the author of the book. It is available for download for free on Bandcamp or Youtube.

## Background

> *"A collection of four stories, stories about mysterious and tragic things." - Album Description.*
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Twilight and thunderstorms is split up into four parts, the album itself being the second of three in a greater trilogy, known as the "Barriers Trilogy," based after their compilation album name. All three albums in this trilogy feature four stories in each part, each story with three songs assigned for each, allowing for a total of twelve songs per album, just from the story-line songs and not counting extras.

The album uses ambient, dark ambient, and drone influences, building off of the style that was introduced in the first album, some songs being very stylistically similar to others in the same placement, i.e. Tracks 9 and 12 utilising samples by the same artist and a similar style, and other tracks having a similar sound, such as track 5. Twilight goes for a more ambient style, straying away from the crashing instruments in favour of longer, more reverberant droning segments that compliment each other. Similarly to Fiberglass, most of the story-line tracks tell very dark stories, and in the story explanation, it goes into much more detail. If you do not want to read descriptive explanations of graphic and distressing events, you may want to turn back.

## Overview of Each Part

### Part Five: A Summer Storm

Twilight and Thunderstorms is a shorter track, but it is fairly lengthy compared to the shorter songs on Fiberglass. The song is full of the sound of rain and thunder, playing around a quieter ambience which makes up the song. Most of the noise is from the thunder at the beginning and the end of the song, as well as the sample of rain which plays throughout the song, representing the summer storm that caused the unnamed to flee to the cathedral. The sounds of thunder and rain immediately set the tone for Twilight to be a much more literal album than Fiberglass, where the music is much more tied to the story behind it.

Part two starts with a couple of seconds of rain and a piano sample, before it is shut off to breathe life to the grand ambient droning sounds that follow, sounding rather similar to church organs. This leading piano drone carries through the entire track, and most of the other sounds only falling much quieter than the main sound. One of the sounds that plays are bird sounds, directly imitating the words in the description, mentioning how the unnamed could hear said birds from an empty spot in the basement. Although the sound is grand, it carries a mysterious sense with it, representing the mystery of such a building and its strange empty basement.

The final track is just as literal as the first, and it even shares the same rain sample as used in the previous two songs, however this one is much longer and drones through a full ten minute track. Unlike the title track, the rain sound is not as prominent as it is more focused on the thoughts of the unnamed, who was thinking about everything that had happened to him on his journey, meditating in the church hall. The drones clash against one another like waves of thoughts, waves of confusion, wonder, mystery, everything that hangs over the story of the unnamed, and everything that came up to that point in the previous album.

### Part Six: To Live this Lie

Part six opens with Slipping Away, a track that makes its name quite literal at points. The track follows Josh Yolipa as he emerges from an underground complex he was trapped inside of for months, and how he looks through the woods to find yet another place underground. By this time, he was very mentally exhausted and really felt like he was slipping away, especially after losing the only friend he truly had which he met inside the complex. The drones that make up the song seem to slip away at points, and similarly to World Below, it uses sounds that play into the background of the song, sampling subway noises and turning it into an ambient sound.

The second song is much more sorrowful, representing the pain of seeing how awful the world was and how dangerous some people can be, prompting him to leave his normal life behind and life as a dead man, a sort of suicide to that part of him who wanted to live for others, seeing how easily they could be ripped away from the horrors he saw at StarWorld and how he was nearly killed himself, casing him to make the first of his two decisions.

His second decision was that of vengeance, a decision to come back much later and bring ruin to StarWorld. The track follows an ambient structure, followed by main drones which fade out to other ones, all crashing like waves of thought, similarly to ATLSP on Part five, a look inside the mind of someone plotting vengeance. All of the little samples that poke through represent the loneliness of the situation and how he still was not too sure how to act out his plans, but he would later encounter a shadow, the namesake for one of the songs on Solar Eclipse, a segment which was made for EIAAFC, however it took on a new meaning as part of Solar Eclipse.

### Part Seven: Agonizing Angelic Ascension

Part seven starts quite abruptly, similarly to part four on Fiberglass.