Twilight Sad - Here It Snowed. Afterwards It Did

  by John Clarkson

published: 9 / 6 / 2008

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Review

The Twilight Sad are currently working on songs for their second album, which will not be released until early next year. In the meantime, after a successful twelve months in which they both released their critically acclaimed debut album, ‘Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’, and also established themselves as visceral live outfit, they have as an interim step put together ‘Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did’, a six track collection consisting of re-workings of songs from that first album. ‘Here It Snowed. Afterwards It Did’ is, however, far from being another case of remix hell. While Andy MacFarlane’s mercurial and discordant guitar work dominated ‘Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’, the songs on it were originally written around just acoustic guitar and James Graham’s vocals. ‘Here It Snowed. Afterwards It Did’ came about after the Scottish group were invited to play a church and then other quieter settings , and strips the songs back to basics, plugging a fan organ through effects, and only then adding to it the guitars, and also drones and violins. It offers a radical and completely new reinterpretation of the tracks involved, taking the Scottish’act's previous stormy post-rock and shoegazing sound and giving it a folk tinge. ‘Cold Days from the Birdhouse’, which opens both ‘Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters’ and also this new mini-album, develops an eerie, muted industrialism. Mark Devine’s top-heavy drums and MacFarlane’s whirring guitar sound effects, the main points of former single, ‘And She Would Darken the Memory’, are reduced to a mere whisper, and the whole track is overhauled with a slowly beaconing ethereality and beauty which were only part visible in the past. Album track, ‘Mapped By What Surrounded Them’, meanwhile maintains the raging drones of its original, but they are less klaxoning than before, and MacFarlane’s tingling accordion, a shadowy presence on the previous recording, becomes more prominent. The only thing that doesn’t change is James Graham’s enigmatic lyrics, which hinting at both violence and tragedy, remain deliberately obtuse. If there is a false point as a result, it is with the final song, ‘Some Things Last a Long Time’, a previously unreleased track and a softly seesawing cover of Daniel Johnston song, in which Johnston’s all too clear lyrics about love lost jars with what has already gone before. At just over half an hour in length, this is, however, a very fine mini album, one which more than fills the gap with the Twilight Sad until the release of their second proper album next year, and which finds this startlingly original group, having already established a successful formula with their first record, gutsily reinventing their own recent past.

Track Listing:-

1 And She Would Darken The Memory
2 Cold Days From The Birdhouse
3 Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did
4 Mapped By What Surrounded Them
5 Walking For Two Hours
6 Some Things Last A Long Time

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