The Cure’s Robert Smith has repeatedly sung the praises of the Twilight Sad, saying: “If the world was a better place they would be playing to more people, and I think they can.” Perhaps the North Lanarkshire band’s fifth album will make more people take notice. With a new lineup and on the label of fellow superfans Mogwai, it brings epic grandeur to post-punk. There’s certainly nothing new about their sound and fury and throbbing basslines – they fit comfortably into a lineage stretching from the Cure and the Chameleons to the Killers and White Lies – but they have timeless, high-quality songs. The new ones are more direct and – potentially impacted by the death of their close friend, Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison – more impassioned. Singing in an accent as proudly Scottish as Arab Strap or the Proclaimers, James Graham is living these songs of love, loss, abandonment and existential angst. “We’re hanging on by a thread,” he sings, on 10 Good Reasons for Modern Drugs.
With Andy MacFarlane’s guitars howling away, sturm und drang abounds in I’m Not Here (Missing Face) and Keep It All to Myself. The Arbor brings swirling keyboards to the early Cocteau Twins’ glacial shimmer, but there’s a pop sensibility to VTr or Let’s Get Lost, as Graham delivers every vowel with care and precision: “I’m losing you every day, I know that I’m losing …” Dark, bold, big music.
