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Review: 'Twilight Sad, The'
'Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (Reissue)'   

-  Album: 'Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (Reissue)' -  Label: 'FatCat'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '19th April 2014'

Our Rating:
It’s been a remarkable journey for Kilsyth’s finest since they unleashed one of the defining documents of what many lazy journalists have come to brand ‘Scots miserabalism’. But they are very Scottish and very miserable (at least on record, fitting the ‘dour’ archetype to a tee). ‘Fourteen Autumns’ doesn’t contain anything you might dance to or even cause the listener to raise a wan smile, and few bands have dared to sing with an accent so strong as to render the lyrics virtually impenetrable at times. But these are the things that make The Twilight Sad a band who are special, and ‘Fourteen Autumns’ such a landmark release.

As a band who’ve remained staunchly independent and true to their roots – not least of all in their singular approach to their music and their live performances, which are the epitome of visceral, it makes perfect sense for their debut album reissue to be a Record Store Day release (and follows last year’s limited 7” with Scots luminaries Bill Wells and Arab Strap’s Aiden Moffatt of Arab Strap). It also provides the perfect opportunity to revisit an album that stood out as different in its gritty depictions of life and relationships. Glasvegas may have eclipsed The Twilight Sad in commercial terms, but the Sad tell it straight and from the heart.

Gentle shoegaze guitars build to a maelstrom on many a track, and a throbbing bassline and heavy drums underscore the lines ‘And head up dear, you’re shallow and blind / And head up dear, the rabbit might die / Because I’m putting the boot in tonight’ on ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’. No fake nostalgia or prettied-up romanticism here, and ‘Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’ still hits with the same impact now as it did on that first listen.

Of course, most fans will already know this, and will be keen to get stuck into the bonus material that makes this reissue particularly special.

First things first: the bonus tracks certainly are very much bonuses: an entire album’s worth of additions in the shape of demos, outtakes and B-sides. I might complain at the omission of ‘Watching That Chair Painted Yellow’, from the flipside of ‘That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy’, but the raw demo versions of the album’s two singles – still heartstoppingly powerful even now, and after infinite plays – are worth the effort (James Graham’s depiction of the perfect nuclear family where ‘the kids are on fire in the bedroom / the cunt sits at his desk / and he’s plotting away’ never loses its potency). Moreover, the ragged ‘Untitled #2’ shows the band at their most unpolished and the nine-minute ‘Untitled #4’ in their most formative stage, the song built around a heavy, droning riff and thudding drum beat.

‘But When She Left, Gone Was the Glow’ and ‘Three Seconds of Dead Air’ which both featured on the band’s debut EP in 2005 are both present in demo form, the roughness of the recordings by no means dulling their emotional force.

‘2d’ appears to be a developmental version of ‘That Summer’ with different lyrics, and is a welcome inclusion for the way it helps build the picture of the band’s development from those first early gigs that were anything but crowd-pleasing outings, through the sketching of proper songs to the fully-realised album versions. That they would go on to release acoustic reworkings of a number of the songs only further highlights a band in perpetual motion and for whom a song is never completely finished, but always evolving... but that’s a whole other story.
  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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Twilight Sad, The - Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (Reissue)