Album Review : The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead

All musicians and listeners are aware of this on some level of course, but it’s difficult to think of a band that have made this such an integral part of their music as The Twilight Sad. 2007’s Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters arrived with an absolute roar, steeped in memory and trauma and unbridled white noise. With the tap of a guitar pedal, the band seemed to be soundtracking the noise that fills broken and unbroken homes and the heads of those that occupy them. At the centre was James Graham’s sometimes understated, sometimes unhinged vocals, coloured by the noise of a Glaswegian accent. The result was acclaim in both the UK and the US (no mean feat for a British band) and a lot of gigs.

So Forget The Night Ahead arrives, two years down the line, and The Twilight Sad are having to face up to a certain amount of expectation for the first time in their short career. Incredibly, they manage to live up to this in the album’s first ten minutes – the opening pairing of ‘Reflections of the Television’ and ‘I Became A Prostitute’ could very well be the band’s best material to date. The former is an impressive opener, swaggering in on a tide of distortion and an ominous bassline with James Graham’s lyrics veering from fearful (‘There’s people downstairs’) to threatening (‘I’m more than a fighter, you know’). ‘I Became A Prostitute’, meanwhile, for all its imagery of money, blood and exploitation, is The Twilight Sad’s most accessible moment so far, treading a line between melody and noise with skill.

In fact, this dual concern with melody and noise is something that recurs throughout Forget The Night Ahead and marks it out as a step forward from their debut. Guitarist Andy MacFarlane’s noise is more controlled and more varied and the band’s songwriting has improved alongside this. Graham’s lyrics revisit some of his concerns from Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, while also drawing on, in his own words, ‘…things that have happened to me over the past two years, revolving mainly around losing people and being none too proud or happy with myself about my antics and situations I’ve found myself in’. Bruised masculinity lies at the heart of this album, in amongst the spoken and unspoken strains of individuals and relationships under pressure.

So the record is a dark proposition, both musically and lyrically, but it explores these themes with a greater amount of depth and variation than the band have done previously. ‘The Room’ is built on the pulse of a bass drum and piano while the lyrics document a disintegrating relationship ambiguously, laying the denial on thickly as the noise rises ominously around the song like an ocean, but, crucially, never breaking. ‘That Birthday Present’, in contrast, kicks with a powerful ferocity, half obscuring Graham’s vocals. He is unaccompanied, however, for the first part of ‘Floorboards Under The Bed’, before distortion and a mournful piano close out the song. The extra instrumentation on the record is a definite plus – Laura MacFarlane’s violin and the touches of piano mean the band aren’t relying on their effects pedals all the time.

Another highlight is the album’s closer, ‘At The Burnside’ – Graham’s vocal echo off the piano intro before drums and distortion crash in. It’s probably the band’s most focused, poignant song to date, and it’s a hell of a note to close on. Forget The Night Ahead is a strong second album - building on the sound of their debut, they’ve added new dimensions and created a record that flows as a whole. Sonically and lyrically, it’s a complex piece of work that rewards time and unfurls a little more with each listen, while also packing the raw, immediate power of their first album. It won’t trouble the mainstream, but it’s reassuring and inspiring to hear a British band genuinely striving to create a unique musical aesthetic - one built on memory and emotion and, most importantly, noise.