New Music: The Twilight Sad. Point and Counterpoint.

This week, contributors Mike Dyer and Craig Gidney have both supplied reviews of the new album by Scottish band Twilight Sad, Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did. Full reviews below the fold.

Point

Post Adolescent Idealism, Craig Gidney
"Cold Days from the Birdhouse" opens the album on a sea of droning postrock guitars and the strident brogue of singer James Graham's voice. It's melodic but it also has the passion and drama of the instrumental band the Dirty Three. The lyrics are about love lost, but the overarching theme is about the fate of Young Men as Artists than ones that got away. "And She Would Darken The Memory" (love those titles!) simmers with angelic glockenspiels and violins mixed into ambient leitmotifs. The title track is restructured dreampop, with a little more testicular fortitude. "Mapped By What Surrounded Them" and "Walking for Two Hours" have an epic, chiming feel and are almost pop songs; they have enough hidden sounds and twists to stop them from becoming Coldplay. The closing "Some Things Last A Long Time" starts as a plainsong, with just Graham's voice before being drenched in My Bloody Valentine reverb. There's a Scottish spirit that pervades this music, but its less obvious than Big Country-style bagpipe guitars, and it is more than the vocals. The surreal lyrics and artiness of the project reminds me of fellow Glaswegian Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark, which mixed the male bildungroman with a wacky SF mediation on death. Like Lanark , the Twilight Sad capture post adolescent idealism without the earnestness in bold, symphonic—and original—strokes.

Counterpoint:

The Twilight Same, Michael Dyer
So, this weekend I was doing a little work at the coffe shop and decided to give Twilight Sad's new album, Here it never snowed, Yesterday it did a cursory listen ahead of this review. Maybe three songs in, I noticed iTunes was repeating one of the tracks; it must be set to "repeat one," and I hadn't realized it. So, I open iTunes and find that, no, in fact it's playing through the entire album, one song after the other. It's just that every song sounds more-or-less the same. Here's the recipe for the everytrack:

1) fade-in deep electronic ambients

2) layer on a few heavy, synthesized guitar riffs, and some percussion supported by electronic microbeats

3) intersperse lyrics sung by a gravely Scottish Bono

4) have Scottish Bono occasionally screams the lyrics

5) continue mix for four to eight minutes

So, if you like all those things, and can't get enough, you'll absolutely love this album. I think this list makes for a really attractive mix (in some cases, it comes together beautifully, like in the track "walking for two hours"), but, in the aggregate, it's too much of a good thing. More variation and this album would be killer. But there's isn't. It's incredibly repetitive, which ultimately damages what is good about it. My advice would be to pick your favorite track (if you can tell them apart) and add it to a larger playlist . . .

The Twilight Sad'sHere, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did is available online via .