THE TWILIGHT SAD - Fourteen Autumns Fifteen Winters Review

The first time you hear the Twilight Sad, a four-piece band from just outside Glasgow, they already sound familiar. It's like they've been around a while, even though their debut EP only came out last September. You might think of Arab Strap's Aiden Moffett when hearing singer James Graham because he's got a feel for concrete imagery and does nothing to hide his thick Scottish accent. Shoegaze comes to mind because guitarist Andy MacFarlane favors billowy curtains of white noise that dominate the sound field. ...full text The Twilight Sad began as a band of excess. Shaping and refashioning tape loops, theremin, thumb pianos, effects pedals, and such into long, meandering instrumentals that often strained the bottom of the hour, the Glasgow band opened with a will to heave it all together. They wanted to mount and recede, I guess, to dizzy their audience in circles of airless headstuff, then put some stern, frozen-soundin’ shit around the edges ‘til they’d developed an atmospheric glaze like My Bloody Valentine or Sigur Ros. Or, more likely, they didn’t really know what they wanted....full text Maybe it's because of its very nature as the un-genre without guidelines, rules or expectations, indie rock's become a remarkably trendy genre. We've burned through freak-folk, art-punk, singer/songwriters, indietronica, revivals of garage rock, glam and post-punk as well as minor surges in popularity from a zillion other micro-genres in just a few years. That's a lot of bandwagons to fill for a genre that pays lip services to the notion that the whims of trends and fashions are for weak minds, isn't it?...full text