D'you know?

I'm sadly a little unplugged from the zeitgeist these days. I don't get a chance to listen to much/anything on the music blogs I read, and find myself less interested in doing so. It's a little sad in some ways, others not so much. I found that when I was doing the blog full-time before, I rarely had a chance to listen to albums for days on end and to revel in the new depths they revealed. Time out = good, and the little bit of writing I do these days is exactly right.

That said, today's artistes wouldn't have needed the extra time for me to know that their album was something special. The Twilight Sad release their first album next week, entitled Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters. Sounds a little adolescent? Maybe so, but not without good reason. The standout track (actually that's a misnomer, most of the other songs are every bit as good. This one just happens to be the most... lyrically significant, I guess), Last Summer, At Home I Was The Invisible Boy extols the virtues of a stable upbringing with such depths of sadness that he could for all the world (bar his gruff-yet-tender Glaswegian drawl) be the fourteen year old he claims to be.

The sound is somewhere between Mogwai and what Hope Of The States were aiming for. Emotionally-charged, but not in the stripy-jumper, floppy haired kind of way. I've used all these comparisons before in my review, but they really do take the same sort of real-life grit and bit-back emotion of Arab Strap and inject into it some post-rock posturings. It's the best album I've heard this year, which is already saying something quite big.

I'm in something of a quandary now though; part of me wants to write on, eulogising the band with all sorts of hyperbolic, excessively gushing and fawning. Part of me however wants to just leave it at that and let the music speak for itself. Not out of laziness, but out of respect for a rather lovely piece of music, that oldest of artforms.

The Twilight Sad - That Summer, At Home I Was The Invisible Boy (Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters (Fat Cat), 2007)