Synth Single Review: “Twilight Zone” by Nature of Wires & Machina X
by Karl Magi
Nature of Wires and Machina X’s “Twilight Zone” carries desolate emotional weight as it unfolds. Portentous chords rise on brassy tones while strings cry out with taut melancholy and whispered, twisted vocals shiver through the air. A fierce bass throb and rocketing drums join Machina X’s trembling delivery, capturing the ache embedded in the lyrics. The stomping bass and dense percussion drive the track forward with relentless force.
Machina X’s gripping voice is sorrow-tinged while the strings lament with mournful intensity. Underlayers seethe angrily as whispered vocals build to a crescendo, her distinctive tone taking hold of me. Orchestral elements double her dusky clarity while a shadowed chant repeats with dark hunger. The piano enters with fragile restraint and her broken, intimate performance grips the music with loss and depression.
Nature of Wires weaves a shadowed tapestry as the strings surge higher above the industrial-weighted rhythm, vocals floating with pain and yearning for escape. A growling chant returns as Machina X carries darkness in every phrase and the song closes with delicate piano notes and eerily whispered echoes.
As the storyteller confesses, “Your beauty made me weak, but your cruelty, it cut me so deep,” she reveals that the subject asked forgiveness but not permission before they “crushed the heart that you once lived in, stripped off the meat and left the bones,” abandoning her to the Twilight Zone.
“Friend or foe, how’s a girl supposed to know?” she asks, drained by someone she allows to wound her, admitting, “Nosferatu’s got nothing on you.” Obsessed and far from home, “all alone in the Twilight Zone,” she wonders how she could be blinded by “this charming man, this harming man.”
“More than mortal, sometime misfit, told his truths like some pseudo mystic,” she sings, drawn by an undertow like the Styx into “the deeper unknown,” questioning how to escape the Twilight Zone in which she now finds herself.
