60 ALBUMS @ 60 : #8

The Twilight Sad – Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters (2007)

I’ve reached the stage of the rundown where just about any of the remaining albums could have been listed at #1.  If I had finally landed on Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, then I would have focussed on the fact that, almost by luck than design, I came across a band who were just starting out when I first saw and heard them, after which I had the great fortune to watch them grow over the years during which time their sound would evolve and develop, but never at the expense of making music that would become so alien to me that I would shirk away from buying it.

I’ve no doubt that The Twilight Sad are the group I’ve caught live the most over the past decade-and-a-half, often in the company of my good friend Aldo.   It is no lie to say that very single show has delivered at least one ‘wow’ moment, no matter how big or small the venue/audience, and no matter whether it has been a full band or the stripped down version in which James Graham sings and Andy MacFarlane plays guitar.  And don’t get me started on the show they played at Paisley Abbey in October 2013 accompanied by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, an event I still can’t quite believe ever happened….

I have a great love for every one of very one of their five studio albums, and if the rule of no more than one LP per group or singer was being strictly enforced, they would have had multiple entries (as indeed would have been the case with many other acts).  But the debut is the only one that could possibly have made it to #1 in the rundown.

It remains an astounding and powerful listen, one that lyrically and sonically still makes my jaw drop with each and every listen.  It came out a couple of months prior to me moving to Canada to work for almost five months, and I fully expected by the time I got home that their name would be everywhere.  Here’s what may well have been the first full review of the album, published in The Skinny, a free cultural newspaper widely distributed across Glasgow and Edinburgh:-

This is what Mogwai have unleashed upon us, and we must be proud. Glasgow’s post-rock pioneering has stretched at least as far as Kilsyth, where The Twilight Sad have taken the intoxicating nature of the quintet’s whispering/screaming guitar recipe and added ingredients of their own.

With prominent (and local) vocals, and a theme to unite the songs-not-stretches, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters is the kind of sprawling triumph that Hope of The States always seemed to be aiming at. It tells everyday tales of hormonal adolescent angst in incredibly epic terms: sonically, as loud as the roar of a tidal wave; feedback, distortion and noise, blare and relax, and blare again. Lyrically – “the kids are on fire in the bedroom,” the key bawl from the key track, is a pretty grand way of describing parents’ inattention to teenage torment.

With a duration of 45 minutes, The Twilight Sad have wisely wrapped up their debut LP before the repeated quiet/loud blueprint becomes any kind of a boring labour, and in future days a certain lack of versatility might potentially pose a hindrance – but for right now, the outfit are fully deserving of praise in crafting one of the finest Scottish albums in years. [Ally Brown]

mp3: The Twilight Sad – That Summer, At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy

Astonishingly, this was the first lyric that James Graham ever wrote.

Finally, Ally Brown closed out his five-star review with a word of caution that a lack of versatility might potentially pose a hindrance.  He needn’t have worried as their collective skills and talents have taken them all around the world, more often than not as the band The Cure want to open for them no matter the city.  North American audiences are being wowed right now….

JC