| « Reggie's in Full Effect | Submerged in Tulsa » |
Concert Tue Oct 02 2007
So Far From Home
I first heard and saw Scottish band the Twilight Sad this past summer at Pitchfork Music Festival. They opened Saturday with a noisy half hour set to a handful of bemused and bewildered onlookers. It was probably the most inopportune time for them to be playing. The park opened later than expected that day, so most of the festival goers filed in after they finished. So not only did very few get to experience the set, it was approximately 85 degrees that day, and the Twilight Sad is not summer pop music. It’s for a rainy, lonely night after you break up with your significant other, or a long cab ride home after work, or a Thursday in October at the Empty Bottle.
Their debut album Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters opens with a piano key driving into oblivion and an acoustic guitar playing lamentably. As fuzzed out electrics rise and fall, strings hover over slowly pounding drums, and lead singer James Graham (in a full-on Scottish brogue) warbles about ruined plans and hotel rooms and someone’s (probably a lover’s) loss of manners. The noise crescendos to a furious pitch before coming back down, retreating into a corner, and leaving us once again with that lonely piano key. “Cold Days from the Birdhouse” initiates the sonic and emotional themes that mark most of the album. It’s loud and noisy, and they employ and layer a variety of different instruments to achieve their chaotic sound. The jangly glitter and soaring vocals openly hint at mournful regret for seasons long past, moments that will never be returned. The success of the Twilight Sad is that the music is at once familiar and unique, abrasive and lovely, abstract yet comforting.
The Twilight Sad do indeed play this Thursday, October 4th, at the Empty Bottle. Local bands Thin Hymns and Health and Beauty open. Show starts at 9pm. Tickets are $10 in advance, or $12 at the door. And it will be loud.
