In the Basement, With Matches
Written: Nov 10 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: useless
Cons: uesless
The Bottom Line: useless
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| crypticcradle's Full Review: Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters by The Twilight... |
It sits by you when feel like you're on a moon all by yourself, looking down at a planet, and you know it's all going on down there. It doesn't cry with you, however, it just drips into your pores like morning dew, it lives with you. Then it vibrates, it electrifies, you feel vindicated in your angst.
This is anyone's angst, this Twilight Sad debut LP, this "Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters", not the mopey stuff, but the stuff of tribulations of aliveness. That's at its core. The music can feel quite epic in a shoegazy way, where the guitar sprawls as it has no business doing, and sweeps and sweeps, and illuminates all the particles around you. The words are sparse, repetitious, but they singe into the music, and they aim to your vulnerabilities. You can sing them loud, they are uncomplicated. It creates a moving atmosphere of sound you can engulf yourself in, especially with headphones.
Broken kids bedrooms and family trees harvested take full control over the most immediately memorable lines of the LP, "The kids are on fire in the bedroom" (of "That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy"). They are built up to by pounding percussion, and ridicule of what the ideal family would be built-upon by our lead-singer, defiantly Scottish, James Graham. It is this pure, however simplistic, imagery he controls you with, a single sentence, a profound statement. The music then flourishes, he loses command over his voice and it cracks the soundscape, the guitars ride high on powerful chords, a mushroom cloud of emotion forms.
Many songs are patterned this way, with opening subtlety and ensuing grandeur, like Yo La Tengo's atmospherics going to that lonely place and getting louder and louder. By the experiments of the circular "Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard", or the closing title track instrumental, we see that they have a few other ideas still not fully developed, but willing to reach, and that will come. For now they ride high on their finest trick. From "Cold Days From the Birdhouse", the opener, we know that is one hell of a trick, as piano plinks and melancholy guitar playing gives way to sad fireworks and, "Your red sky at night won't follow me, you won't follow me now," my favorite lyric sung with such raw intensity as the world around us threatens to roll credits. "Talking With Fireworks" is another'n that sticks in the same realm, this time bombarding us with the smothering guitar first before leaving in a spare drum stick tapping and simplistic guitars, while Graham sings, "Does your fear not grow when you see that you're all mine, with a knife in your chest." That almost sounds cliche or forced, but with the earnest delivery and the knowledgeable musical arrangements, it's ace in the broken heart category, like much else you will hear here.
It's a silent stinger, one you buy when you're out at the store buying something else you really want, then end up listening to nothing but this. The semi-closer, last song with lyrics, "I'm Taking the Train Home", leaves you with the most solid evidence that The Twilight Sad could make something beyond a minor wonder such as this, with hard-hitting and manic drums and guitars that rock a little more traditionally before they reach into cold space for the North Star. It slows and it twinkles and it sings, "And your green eyes turn to blue, your always, your always, begging for the truth." Ain't it so? Truth in souls. And that's why this one'll steal the show in your collection for its little piece of time. But wait. I think something bigger is coming to colonize your senses, and until then...
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
crypticcradle
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Member: Eric
Location: San Luis, AZ
Reviews written: 72
Trusted by: 136 members
About Me:
lord if you've got lungs, c'mon and shout me out!
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