Pitchfork

Must be something in the ale in Scotland because nowhere else do bands find that knife's edge between overwrought and overpowering and jab it into your ribs with such brutal force. The Twilight Sad, who hail from a suburb of Glasgow, bring to mind those moments when Arab Strap would move into the overdriven guitar territory of Mogwai, but there's an emotional directness at work here that puts them in a different arena.

The band introduced their sound on a self-titled EP late last year, and a full-length, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters-- from which these three tracks are culled-- is set to follow in April. And that sound is a grand thing: Accordions bubble up during quiet passages, grounding songs in a cobblestone back-alley folk, and against this is an approach to guitar-- ringing arpeggios during exposition, huge blasts of overdriven white noise during the climaxes-- that's familiar for a reason: the shit works. On top of it all is singer James Graham, who has the from-the-stomach bellow to follow the guitar feedback into the ether.

"Cold Days From the Birdhouse" is a good demonstration of the range and explosiveness of his strong voice. My wife thinks Graham sounds like a latter-day Jonathan Richman trying on a Scottish brogue, but the way his voice breaks at the song's peak-- built piece-by-piece from an opening of a single plinked piano note and acoustic slide-- is all his own.

MP3: > The Twilight Sad: "Cold Days From the Birdhouse"
[from Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters; due 04/24/07 on FatCat Records]

"That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy" sounds like a title some emo kid borrowed from Morrissey-- and hey, the song sorta delivers that too. But Graham has the necessary distance from the gawky 14-year old at the song's center (another quality borrowed from Morrissey), so he tells an engaging story and doesn't whine.

"Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard" switches up the structure, toning down from epic rock for an interlude of mantra repetition. If the Twilight Sad sometimes have a touch of old-school U2 about them, this is one of their gooseflesh-raising Enofied interludes, as vocals overlap in a canon of romantic longing.