The Twilight Sad: Forget The Night Ahead

For an accelerated immersion in The Twilight Sad experience, pop in the Scottish rockers’ second LP Forget The Night Ahead and skip to Track 7, “That Birthday Present.” It may be the fastest song The Twilight Sad’s ever recorded, replacing the band’s usual dogged pounding with aggression, scrape, and an explosive climax. And yet beneath the squall, frontman James Graham is still busy exploring memories and the moods they evoke, in a distinctive singsong voice. Forget The Night Ahead is less immediately appealing than The Twilight Sad’s debut album Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters; the songs are noisier and more monotonous, with little of the slow build and subtle lilt of songs like “Last Year’s Rain Didn’t Fall Quite So Hard” or “That Summer At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy.” But the Forget tracks “I Became A Prostitute,” “Seven Years Of Letters,” and “The Neighbours Can’t Breathe” show a band capable of muscling up without losing a fascination with fragile, fleeting moments. If Graham and his cohorts have a default posture, it’s with their backs turned and heads down, gazing into a microscope at the minutiae of a day long past.