The Twilight Sad is properly named. The Scottish trio of vocalist James Graham, guitarist Andy MacFarlane and drummer Mark Devine specializes in mood-altering music that ranges from hushed melancholia to swirling, rhythmically dynamic rave-ups. The band’s songs somehow come off simultaneously epic and intimate. It’s as if their buddies Mogwai found a singer equal to the heightened atmospherics inherent in the immaculately crafted walls of sound in which each band gets lost — Graham’s voice is a thing of beauty, plaintive one moment, operatic the next.
The Twilight Sad’s fourth full-length, Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave (due in the States Oct. 27), was recorded at Mogwai’s Castle of Doom Studios in Glasgow, a place that no doubt influenced the chilly feeling one gets when immersed in the album’s 10 songs. After a nearly nonstop run of touring and recording over the last seven years, the band apparently altered its approach when it came to writing the new material, which, like its previous album, employs a healthy dose of keyboards and other less obvious electronically aided richness.
“We spent a lot of time at home when writing this new record,” Graham says in the press notes that accompany Nobody Wants to Be Here. “We got to hang out with old friends and get back to some sort of normality, which I think really helped me clear my mind and focus in on writing these new songs. I had a lot I wanted to get off my chest and I’ve done that with this new record.”
