The Twilight Sad – Forget the Night Ahead

FatCat

In a music world where the past is ever present, remarketed and remastered for future generations, The Twilight Sad seem to have chanced upon the dusty old trunk marked “The Eighties” and gleefully plundered its contents wholesale, though highly discriminatingly. Luckily, these resourceful Scots have what it takes to transcend the sum of their influences, rearranging the jigsaw pieces in a reassuringly wrong order – imagine The Wild Swans‘ soaring vocals set adrift on a sea of My Bloody Valentine‘s guitar, underpinned by a stately Joy Division rhythm section or perhaps Aztec Camera‘s introspection drowned in a deluge of Sonic Youth guitar skronk.

The sound on Forget the Night Ahead is both dense and expansive, but succeeds in being epic while avoiding the pomp and bluster of the likes of U2, falling somewhere not too far from British Sea Power. With his broad Scots delivery and dark but unornate lyrics singer James Graham manages to steer clear of self importance even when at his most impassioned. There’s something unmistakably Glaswegian about The Twilight Sad – despite the breadth of discernable influences on Forget the Night Ahead, in the end they come over like nothing so much as the unlikely spawn of hometown heroes The Blue Nile and Mogwai.

-Alan Holmes-