With its grandiose Wagnerian title, Battlestar Galactica cover design and excerpts of futuro claptrap printed on the sleeve, you might well expect Twilight of the Computer Age to possess some density, some gravity-- like the black hole-like object on the cover. It's a little hard to believe that this is the same Wharton Tiers who just recently performed on Sonic Youth's elegant summa of modern music, Goodbye 20th Century. While that work had sweeping vision and grievous grace, Twilight is overwrought and prodigal. Yet both works seem to want to sustain that backward glance at the century that was, as if to achieve a retrospective on our very idea of the future. Perhaps both Tiers and Sonic Youth have copped this stance from Glenn Branca (whose influence pervades the music of Tiers and Thurston Moore alike), whose ninth symphony "L'Eve Future," offered one of modern music's most troubling visions of future's past.

However, it's really Branca's second symphony that Twilight musically recalls: both works are pummeled by eight cacophonous electric guitars. But the music of the Tiers Ensemble doesn't weigh enough to merit such excess, not to mention there are caterwauling rock sax lines that recall the mid-eighties heyday of Glenn Frey. "In Orbit" is most guilty of blowing that "You Belong to the City" cop-rock vibe. Perhaps it's appropriate, because Twilight's greatest sin is excessive force, using four or five guitars to cover up a lack of structure and a near-total absence of anything to say.

The title track comes off like an outtake from Trans Am's Futureworld, with its dirgeful sax and electric guitar acrobatics. "Peaking on Mars" starts Slinty and ends Sonic Youthy, fucking itself somewhere in between. "Iridium Bop" is the closest thing the ensemble gets to a keeper, perhaps because the multiple guitars are treated with compelling effects and arranged with some delicacy. Nevertheless, the track is still compromised by hornman Fletcher Buckley's dark, chocolate-smooth tenor saxophone lines-- five guitars severely beat you with a sack of doorknobs while this guy's horn tries to get you in bed.

Still, the dearth of new ideas is this album's greatest flaw. The modes the Ensemble experiments with can all be located without difficulty on a host of the last half-decade's great experimental albums: the aforementioned Branca and Sonic Youth, Carbon's Datacide, Godspeed You Black Emperor's debut, and most of the Trans Am catalog. Even the electric noir of the first and final track have already been done with reckless creativity by Zeena Parkins on her criminally neglected 1996 album, Maul=Mouth=Betrayer.

The now-anemic dire futurism of the album's title and packaging offends the sensibility not because it's been done to death (and more or less perfected thematically by Radiohead), but because it's totally irrelevant to the music, which does not seem particularly involved in the computer age at all (much less whatever might be expected to follow its twilight). The prospect that the Wharton Tiers Ensemble has laid the foundation for the next epoch of experimental music makes a strong case for cryogenic freezing, and little else.

-Brent S. Sirota