Band of the Week: The Twilight Sad

Posted on Aug 21st 2009 8:09AM by Stephen Dowling
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Scotland's long had a reputation for breeding bands that don't shy away from skull-ringing noise.

For every jangly ensemble like Belle and Sebastian or BMX Bandits there's a Jesus and Mary Chain or Mogwai primed to unleash waves of feedback-stained noise. Even Teenage Fanclub had more in common with Sonic Youth than the Byrds when they started.

The Twilight Sad, a four-piece from Kilsyth, just outside Glasgow, continued that proud legacy of Caledonian cacophony in 2007 with the release of their debut album 'Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters', which included 'And She Would Darken the Memory', a boiling, epic slab of anthemic noise redolent of My Bloody Valentine's intense melodies.

Two years later we have the follow-up 'Forget the Night Ahead', which is released in the U.K. October on Oct. 5 and in the U.S. and Canada on Sept. 21.The band have just announced a tour of the U.S. which will see them team up with labelmates Brakes, Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks for a major trawl across the highways, before returning to the U.K. for a 10-date tour from Oct. 20.

"There are a few themes with this record, and one main theme binding it together," singer James Graham said earlier this year. "As with the last record, we aren't giving much away with the themes because we like the listener to relate the songs back themselves and maybe try and figure it all out on their own Plus, it's personal. I would like to keep it close to my chest."

What the Twilight Sad do promise is a heightening of the surge-and-release that caused such a stir a few years ago. This, they promise, is much darker and far more ambitious...

"We made a point of staying home to write," guitarist Andy MacFarlane says. "Writing on tour is a bad idea, so we stayed in Scotland for the full process. It let us go home after sessions -- if we weren't getting snowed-in the studio -- and we had more time to experiment and develop the ideas we had."