THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FORGET THE NIGHT AHEAD -- 8/10
Going alphabetically means I do a double-dose of the Sad, but also means I have to go in backwards order. Fortunately for me, Forget the Night Ahead is as good a starting point as any when approaching The Twilight Sad in a holistic manner. The 2000's had their fair share of bands who made their debut with instant classics - The Arcade Fire, The Strokes, Interpol, The Libertines, among other, perhaps slightly more under the radar acts like JJ72 or Hope of the States whose debut albums still get all the press. It's no surprise that Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters should be The Sad's best known album. In sharp contrast to the more minimalist or stripped down sound of most of the bands mentioned above, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters takes a page out of MBV's playbook with heavy walls of sound, and the stoic yet sensitive and at times intensely impassioned musings of James Graham and his thick Scottish accent make it a distinctive and uniquely memorable sounds. Forget the Night Ahead, rather than just being the follow-up to Fourteen Autumns, serves as the point of departure for the sound that has defined the band ever since, maintaining moments of shoegazey loudness but for the most part moving more toward a more sparse presentation that is more comparable to their post-punk contemporaries, Interpol in particular, than their debut was. In this, one might regret that the walls of sound that set their debut apart have been more and more left to the wayside, but, on the other hand, it freed The Twilight Sad to approach their songs in a more conventional manner, allowing them to showcase the flashy choruses that they were always meant to write. Where their debut draw a certain vague beauty from the mystery of repeated phrases like "your red sky at night won't follow me", "these walls are filled with blame", or "your green eyes turn to blue", Forget the Night Ahead makes more use of a more typical verse-chorus structure, and, when done most effectively, presents some seriously impressive bangers. Chief among these is second track "I Became a Prostitute", which hops adeptly from chorus to chorus - "we're all fine in the back of your mind..." to "you are the bearer of a womb without love" - with an aggressive heft accented with the same jagged but now clearer guitar din as always. Forget the Night Ahead starts off strong, with four stellar tracks, but, not entirely unlike Fourteen Autumns, slows down in the middle. The likes of "That Birthday Present" and "At the Burnside" do their best to pick things up on the back half, but overall the album feels like it becomes a bit samey over time. Not to say that The Twilight Sad aren't great a what they do best - heavy and earnest elegiacs with deceptively catchy hooks - but over time, the impact is dulled, such that the simple but direct introduction to "Interrupted" becomes one of the highlights of the album. Taken alone, each of these songs still packs a punch, and while the sound of this album moves toward the broader trends in 2000's indie and post-punk, one can now see that this was a crucial step in forging the sound that would emerge, like a dark and cynical butterfly, from its cocoon with Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave. This is not to say that Forget the Night Ahead doesn't have value on its own, as it's packed with a seething energy, but it's not quite as tight as The Twilight Sad's first and most recent releases. Highlights include "I Became a Prostitute", "Seven Years of Letters", "That Birthday Present", "At the Burnside".
THE TWILIGHT SAD -- FOURTEEN AUTUMNS & FIFTEEN WINTERS -- 9/10
I could have sworn I'd reviewed this album before, but apparently not. After the listening to Forget the Night Ahead, hitting play for this album and hearing the tinny piano and slide guitar gently growing at the start of "Cold Days from the Birdhouse" is like going home after a year abroad. It's familiar, and yet there's a newness to it that comes in spending time away. It's been awhile since I listened to this album, not because I don't really, really enjoy it, but just from having been listening to other stuff lately (mostly emo, please don't judge). Right away, there's a quality to it that a lot of the other major classic albums of the 2000s were missing. Because where it shares bits and pieces of what made some of those other albums, listed in the previous review, great, this is one of those few albums that puts it all together. It's got that rusticity that made Funeral so different at the time, the darkness and cynicism of Turn On the Bright Lights, the youthful restlessness of the likes of Is This It, and the open frankness of another Scottish band of the 2000s that means so much to me (Idlewild, who combined these elements before they even existed in their separate forms on the 2000 masterpiece 100 Broken Windows). For all the novelty of how this album sounds, it's got the goods to back it up. The first two tracks on this album may be the best on any album, ever, traversing between warmth and passion with a natural ease that's immediately relatable. But it's not all about "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" and "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy", it's about the poetic moments that effervesce out of thin air throughout this album, separated by scenic, layered soundscapes. Because of the hefty titles of these songs, which on any other album would appear pompous and overwrought (see Funeral), it's hard to remember exactly where these moments appear, but when moments like "and why do they come when you're always raining", "and do your fear not grow when you see that you're all mine, with a knife in your chest", or "head up dear, the rabbit may die", the words themselves, on reflection, don't seem to mean anything, but there's a certain significance in the way they're expressed, like an abstract painting, the communicates a profound emotion. Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters may be inconsistent at times, but this is a remarkable album in the way in which is communicates its messages, through climaxes of energy and obfuscated language, that is special in unique. Highlights include "Cold Days From the Birdhouse," "That Summer, At Home I Became the Invisible Boy", "Walking for Two Hours", "And She Will Darken the Memory".
THURSDAY -- FULL COLLAPSE -- 7.5/10
Ooooooooooh boy. This is an album that likes to live on the edge if there ever was one. Much like Finelines, reviewed in my last set now nearly a year ago, Full Collapse is very much emblematic of it's time, it's polished production and over the top angst in this case not a product of its time, but, in fact, the archetype of it's time. You see, Full Collapse is the album that defined screamo as a sub-genre, which is sure to give it a black mark through the lens of time, chaining its legacy to the likes of AFI and The Used, and not undeservedly, perhaps. In marked contrast to some of the more lavish emo albums of the '90's, Mineral's The Power of Failing, for instance, Full Collapse is flawlessly sleek and and almost laboratory levels of clean, such that in moments of over-the-top emotion, one hesitates to blame it on youthful exuberance or the foibles of inexperience. Such is the case of the odd introduction "A0001", which seems like it should introduce a sci-fi concept album rather than the raw confessional that follows. This is followed immediately, however, by the serpentine riff of the vivid and monumental "Understanding in a Car Crash", which sets the tone for this album of highly polished emo anthems, accentuated by a healthy dose of screams. In comparison to the likes of more recent emo bands like The Hotelier or The World is a Beautiful Place..., Full Collapse isn't quite as excessive as one might assume for the band that put screamo on the map, but it is at least a little bit over the top. It does add a significant potency to the likes of "Autobiography of a Nation" and, especially, "Cross Out the Eyes", but by the time we get to "I am the Killer" and the otherwise very good "Winding Up", it starts to feel unnecessary. Perhaps fittingly, this is an album of extremes. First of all, there will be plenty that will despise this album for fitting too well into the much maligned yet nonetheless popular scene that it would ultimately be crucial in spawning, and many will find the constant flow of unhinged emotion, "the sound of your shotgun pulse sounding over and over in your silent halls", to be just too much. At its core, however, Full Collapse is a gripping album, full to the brim with energy, and if you can throw restraint to the wind, you may just be able to get swept up in it. Highlights include "Understanding in a Car Crash", "Concealer", "Cross Out the Eyes", "Standing on the Edge of Summer".
ARCADE FIRE -- FUNERAL -- 8.5/10
There was a time I disdainfully refused to give the Arcade Fire a serious listen. At a time when all my friends who listened to indie music would not shut up about them, the more so with the Butler brothers spending their summers in a town near mine (and filming the video for what I now think to be their best song, "Rebellion (Lies)", in that same town, where my grandparents live), a time when they won the obligatory indie band Grammy for an album that is probably only their third best, all while bands like, say, The Twilight Sad, were completely ignored, a time when they were emblematic of that lumberjack hipster aesthetic that everyone hates but to which I am now ambivalent, I couldn't bear to listen to them as a matter of principle. Well, times have changed. I could smugly pan Reflektor as pompous, overambitious (as I listened through Dog Man Star for the billionth time) and yet not especially good, and be right about it, and now that Everything Now has happened... I guess I can make my peace with The Arcade Fire. People are all about The National now, I think (their best work now a decade behind them), so I can drop my righteous indignation and give them an honest listen, after all this time. Now, as you can see, there are lots of random, external factors that go into our tastes. Just as I said hearing the shimmering opening notes to "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" brings me back to when I first heard The Twilight Sad, maybe I'd feel the same about the remarkably similar opening piano to "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", written three years earlier, to give credit where it's due. Funeral, likewise, must have felt like a precious gem at the time when it came out. With the cold and cynical attitude of Interpol, The Strokes, and The Arctic Monkeys so prevalent at the time, having a band come out using every kind of percussion instrument available and unafraid to show some vulnerability must have been a breath of fresh air. This is an album that, compared to those other albums, has quite a bit of variety to it, from the earnest intensity of "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)" and "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)" to the hushed confessionals "Un Annee Sans Lumiere" and "Neighborhood #4 (7 Kettles)". Overall, Funeral uses its rustic production to great effect, containing a certain tenseness like a coiled spring that is never quite released, and the combination of Butler's and Chassagne's voices are amplify that impression elegantly. Taking the aesthetic of Neutral Milk Hotel and slowing it down into stately ballads and angsty anthems, this album sounds timeless even now, over a decade later, by virtue of it sounding like a Pre-Raphaelite relic even at the moment that it was released. While this album at times slows down in the middle and straddles the cliché at moments, it contains more than a few truly special moments, and remains deserving of the praise that has been lavished upon it. Highlights include "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)", "Neighborhood #2 (Laika)", "Haiti", "Rebellion (Lies)"
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