The Twilight Sad
East
Village Arts Club
12th
July, 2014
With the notion of an album and its
importance within this modern, content starved digital music scene still up for
debate, there is something quite comforting about a band touring one of their records
in full. It speaks volumes for the quality of an album that a band like The
Twilight Sad feel confident enough in themselves, and in their audience, to be
able to do so with a collection of songs from a single body of work written
just seven years ago. I mean, usually when a band or artists decides to tour an
album, the set list will still be punctuated by hits from other records and the
track list might not even run in the correct order. There’s an argument for
guitar bands that an album should always be able to translate it into a full
live performance, with a coherency and understanding running from the closing
chords of each song to the opening clash of the next. I mean, if this his is
what makes a great album, why shouldn’t it be the defining feature for a great
live set? So with tonight’s show and the rest of this ‘Fourteen Autumns and
Fifteen Winters’ Tour, The Twilight Sad are reverting back to touring in its
simplest, its most basic, but perhaps its purest form.
In the aggressively Scottish James Graham,
The Twilight Sad are blessed with a great, powerful front man. And the intensity
of their music would settle for nothing less, with the growl of guitar feedback
and the crash of rolling cymbals all culminating in Graham’s deep, penetrating
stare from behind the microphone. The roll of the R as he screams ‘…Red sky at
night’ on opener Cold Days From The Birdhouse could almost be graceful, if he
wasn’t convulsing and gyrating between vocal passages like Ian Curtis having an
exorcist. Staring into a corner of the room and not directly at the crowd,
Graham creates the illusion that he is singing these songs directly at a
singular character. It deeply personalizes them, something that is often lost
in a live show, and makes the delivery of every lyric feel like a powerful
moment of catharsis for him and the band.
None of the exhaustive levels of guitar
feedback or the wall of sound textures are lost tonight. The contrast in
dynamic between the verse and chorus of Talking With Fireworks / Here It Never
Snowed provides an obvious peak, and distills everything that makes tonight’s
show and the album great. Graham’s ability to suck every bit of emotion out of
non-specific phrases such as ‘With a knife in your chest’, works with the bands
knack for making even the most ludicrous level of noise and timbre still feel
like a moment of vulnerability, to create a performance almost overwrought with
passion.
Despite their shoegazing qualities, with a few
of clicks on the guitar pedal these songs could almost fit on a U2 album, never
shying away from the dramatic or histrionic like many of their noise mongering
contemporaries. This is what makes The Twilight Sad so enduringly popular and
able to tour an album in full as if they were veterans rinsing a final payday out
of an old masterpiece. Tonight’s performance absolutely justifies its position
as a modern classic, with every moment feeling like a deserved celebration for
anyone who has ever spent time and been moved by it. This is a band carving
diamonds out of the rough, searching for the significance and the profound in
the more mundane areas of life in a way that never tries to offer a solution
because they know that the most important part is the journey towards it.
Mike Townsend
