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The Twilight Sad
Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
Fat Cat
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Article
written by James S
May 17, 2007.
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Coruscating, thunderous guitars. Long unwieldy song titles. Recorded at Chem 19 and Ca Va studios in Glasgow. Whaddya mean it’s not the new Mogwai album? No, dear reader, welcome to the seemingly familiar, yet utterly distinctive world of The Twilight Sad.
When ’Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’ opens with an acoustic guitar and a single note piano refrain, there’s little clue of what’s to come. Once singer James Graham launches into the most Scottish brogue committed to record since The Proclaimers, you might start to get an inkling but nothing prepares you for the aural assault to come when those guitars kick in.
It’s a credit to the band, and their co-producer Peter Katis, that somehow they don’t overwhelm this record completely. Far from it, in fact, as Graham’s vocals remain crisp and clear throughout, whether sung softly or howled desperately. The only downside to this is that the lyrics are exposed as being as oblique as the song titles themselves (erm, That Summer At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy and Last Year’s Rain Didn’t Fall Quite So Hard anyone?)
It’s hard to quibble for long about an album put together with so much passion and precision though. On the likes of Talking With Fireworks / Here, It Never Snowed and And She Would Darken The Memory they manage to out-MBV even Kevin Shields and co, which is no mean feat. The album’s pièce de résistance is its surprising subtlety though, namely the languorous accordion that surreptitiously pins many of the songs together, as best demonstrated on I’m Taking The Train Home.
So, in the end ‘Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’ is very little like Mogwai at all. Except in the fact that it’s fucking great that is.
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