The Twilight Sad are a Scottish post-punk indie rock band and they are one of many shows coming to Stage 112 in 2015.

  • The Twilight Sad
  • March 5, 2015
  • Stage 112, 112 N. Pattee, downtown
  • Doors 8, show 9 p.m.
  • $10 in advance at Rockin' Rudy's, $12 day of show
  • Full bar, 18+

From their press release:

Scots, as a rule, are not noted for their emotional communication; straying rarely from a sort of safe - albeit repressed - stoicism. So when James Graham stood before a sold out London venue earlier this year, awed by the level of support for his band, it was really quite a spectacle to see the Twilight Sad frontman fighting back the tears as he thanked the crowd from the bottom of his heart. A decade after the band first started playing together and seven years after the release of their debut album, the band had decided to tour Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters in its entirety across the UK to coincide with its vinyl re-release. The shows saw fans flying in from countries as far flung as the USA, Israel and all across Europe to catch them.

Fourteen Autumns is something of a paradox. Such is its status as a classic amongst long-time followers of the band that it feels much older than its seven years, while each listen carries with it something new and thrilling. Its wildly dynamic production sees cascading walls of sound give way to quiet moments of sombre reflection, Graham’s thick Glaswegian accent and evocative storytelling a powerful display of anger, sadness and despair. The themes of childhood angst and suffering suggest a confessional folk record, but transposed onto Andy MacFarlane’s shoegaze-influenced guitars and Mark Devine’s powerhouse drumming Fourteen Autumns is something else entirely.

Forget The Night Ahead was released in 2009, a discordant and gloriously unsettling followup to the band’s debut. Once more, it drew praise from across the press, NME lauding its “much darker ambience, with big melodies and vast romantic landscapes”, while The AV Club wrote that it showed “a band capable of muscling up without losing a fascination with fragile, fleeting moments”.

In February 2012, the band brought out their third studio album No One Can Ever Know. It marked a significant shift in direction, eschewing the previously dominant wall of sound production in favour of what MacFarlane called a “colder, slightly militant feel”. Its more electronic arrangements took influence from the likes of Public Image Ltd, Liars and krautrock pioneers Can, with electronic producer Andrew Weatherall (Primal Scream, Fuck Buttons) acting as a consultant during the album’s studio inception. “Purer than innocence and richer than gold, No One Can Ever Know confirms that the Twilight Sad are simply too good to remain a-little-less-than-well-known,” Drowned in Sound wrote, while BBC Music described the songs as “more than ostentatious angst; they’re doors onto shadowy, eerie scenes”. A limited edition tour EP as well as No One Can Ever Know: The Remixes followed in November, seeing tracks from the album reworked by the likes of the Horrors, Com Truise, Breton and Liars.

The same year, the band found an unlikely partner in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, performing a series of intricate arrangements of their songs as part of The Spree festival at Paisley Abbey in October. Where NOCEK demonstrated their comfort in minimalism, the RSNO collaboration showed a band able to succeed at the opposite end of the spectrum. For now, it’s all eyes ahead as the band ready their fourth album, Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave.

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