Brooder James Graham is not a great storyteller. His mission-- along with his band of post-Mogwai Scottish noisemakers-- is to evoke. When Graham repeated lines like, "the kids are on fire in the bedroom," and, "in my dreams I watch Emily dance," on the Twilight Sad's debut LP, 2007's Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, the specifics were left hauntingly up in the air. It's a tactic used by several of the singer's self-serious forebears-- from Joy Division's Ian Curtis to Interpol's Paul Banks-- but one step too far into the abstract and there's too little for listeners to hang their own shared dilemmas upon. With follow-up Forget the Night Ahead, Graham takes his cryptic musings into a pitch-black place, but he still connects enough to make all the fraught drama worthwhile-- especially when coupled with guitarist Andy MacFarlane's still-overwhelming Kevin Shields-by-way-of-Thurston Moore torrents.
Since Fourteen Autumns contained many (albeit vague) references to a severely traumatic childhood, it often sounded like a form of coded primal scream therapy. The album cover showed a cartoon mother angrily waving her masked son away; the album's companion EP, Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did, showed the masked son suffocating the same mother with a pillow. With his mommy and daddy issues sufficiently exorcised, Graham moves onto more adult worries with Forget the Night Ahead-- there's still no summer or spring in Twilight Sad World, and the days are even shorter this time around. And there's no youthful spirit to balance out the dread, either, as it's allowed to run amok throughout the album's 11 punishing tracks. To wit, the closest thing resembling a love song, the roiling "Interrupted", is topped off by Graham murmuring, "you and I will bury them all." It will not be played at weddings. Funerals, maybe.
While Graham has done many interviews over the last few years, he likes to keep mum when it comes to the meaning of his words. "I've never told anyone what my songs are about, and I don't intend to," he once said. And, in a recent Pitchfork interview, he had this to say about Forget the Night Ahead: "Things happened to me and [the album is] basically about trying to forget what happened." Such tactics are hardly enlightening, but they are smart. Because this band's tempest of meat-slap drums and fire-engine-from-hell distortion makes the mind go to disturbing places with very little provocation.
"The Room" is not a particularly detailed song title, but given the track's shadowy images of "nails in our feet" and a creepy "grandson's toy in the corner," it's pretty clear this four-walled space is not all that welcoming. "Look what you have done," says Graham on the song, without telling-- its central offense is as diabolical as you want it to be. The same fill-in-the-blank logic goes for careening stand-out "That Birthday Present", which is not about a Barnes and Noble gift certificate. Possibly alluding to an alcohol-addled friend/lover who can't help but miss their own candles burning out while going "nowhere," the track is a fireball of frustration and anger and gliding guitar corrosion. "The curtains closed again," sings Graham, offering an apropos visual to his own writing style-- listening to Forget the Night Ahead is like looking at silhouetted neighbors through a draped window; the shapes are there but it's hard to say whether someone's being murdered or preparing the family dinner.
With any sort of levity galaxies upon galaxies away, the LP's non-stop direness can read like a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e., while it may be hard to tell each song apart, the overall effect is not easy to shake. "You'll never have some honest fun," goes Graham on "Made to Disappear", perhaps offering a bit of self-flagellation for his own sins. And there is an almost puritanical streak running through the record-- shame, ghosts, and "people downstairs" are constantly encroaching on the singer's consciousness. So is Graham really such an immaculate downer? Guitarist MacFarlane gave his front man up ever-so-slightly in a recent interview, admitting that Graham often "sits in his hotel room on the Skype and we all go out partying" while on tour. While the hopeless, unrequited pair in the middle of "Seven Years of Letters" could seemingly end up simultaneously sipping poison, in reality, they just might be bawling through a webcam. We'll never know. Luckily, the Twilight Sad deal with the real world on their own heavily shrouded terms.
