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There are a number of things that The Twilight Sad do rather well on Forget The Night Ahead; things that their
last album, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, also did rather well. Guitars crunch
malevolently, creating the best walls of fug since Daydream Nation. Emotion, pent-up or
otherwise, lingers in shadows, harkening back to the best proponents of the original
post-punk movement. Drums pound like golf-sized hailstones hitting a corrugated iron roof.
And rather than becoming obsessed with the all-too-familiar rock-rebel craft of
directionless noise-making, the Scottish quartet offer glimpses of melody, something for
the common man to grasp on to.
A sound to fill stadiums, then? Well yes, in many ways. But the thing that, at least for
now, separates this band from the likes of Editors, Bloc Party and, dare it
be said, Snow Patrol, is the band's front man and lyricist, James Graham. Graham,
like his closest forebear, Ian Curtis, fearlessly conjures words from the darkest
places of his past. But his flat-voweled disclosures are oblique and loosely-woven,
emanating from the songs like barely visible apparitions destined for a bleak fate. It is,
at times, like being privy to a troubled man's catharsis.
Forget The Night Ahead sees The Twilight Sad walking the same saturnine path. Graham is
still fraught with the turmoil of his youth and the landscape is as dark, dank and
unforgiving as before. It's a twisted concoction that seems to feed off itself. During
Reflection Of The Television, Graham repeatedly utters "There's people downstairs / there's
people downstairs / there's people downstairs" as drums slap-dum-dum-slap. It's as though
he were goading guitarist Andy MacFarlane into a vengeful retort. Unable to resist
provocation, the song vents its own spleen and explodes as a wave of concussive, overdriven
barbarism.
With the lid blown off, I Became A Prostitute goes for the more conventional opening
riff-verse-chorus song construction. Again, it hits its mark in a haze of bluster. But it's
at this stage that things go slightly awry. Yes, this is a band that creates desolate moods
and evokes murky visions of the past but, as with anything, there are pitfalls that need to
sidestepped.
Seven Years Of Letters and Made To Disappear simply aren't as satisfying as
the opening double salvo. Worse still, the latter exposes Graham's vocal shortcomings.
While he always emotes with conviction, Graham's nasal timbre can feel like one more
jarring noise amid the guitar-heavy maelstrom.
Moreover, there is a worrying predictability in evidence, and the sound of a band happy
going over trodden ground. The Room is a good example. Simple piano chords overlay 4/4 beat
drum pounding. It is, for once, forgiving and noiseless. Graham recalls his youth and speaks
of a creepy "grandson's toy in the corner." And as the song gradually erupts into an angry
cacophony there's a nagging, ooh-couldn't-see-that-coming sense of inevitability. It's not
really a criticism, as much as it is a frustration. That Birthday Present is, again, a furious
torrent of devil-bating noise, but that is all it is.
Happily, Interrupted strikes the right balance between noise-making and the evocation of
something that hits the gut and not merely the eardrum. Graham mutters "It's you and I /
you and I," speaking of a love frustrated, as MacFarlane drives the message home with the
album's best, and probably simplest, fretwork. Further positives come in the form of
experimental interludes Floorboards Under The Bed and Scissors which, musically at least,
hint at a less predictable future for the band.
Forget The Night Ahead is the reassertion of The Twilight Sad's brutal art. But
reassertion can so easily slide into repetition, as is occasionally the case here. There's
no reason why this band's future can't be a very positive one, but one can't help feel it
rests on Graham, and his personal and very public attempts to exorcise his many demons.
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