Guest blogger: James Graham previews the new Twilight Sad LP

So pervasive have The Twilight Sad been over the past few years it's difficult to think of them as a one album band. Yet that's exactly what the Kilsyth quartet are - well, for the next three weeks anyway.

So, before the October release of the bleakly entitled Forget the Night Ahead, band frontman James Graham takes us through a track-by-track account of that 'difficult' second album....


Reflection Of The Television

This song wasn’t fully formed until we went into the studio. We had the vocal melody and a basic guitar line. It was one of those songs where you take it into the studio and you don’t really know what’s going to happen with it, which is pretty exciting and scary at the same time. Fortunately for us it turned out pretty good and as soon as it all came together we knew it was going to be at the start of the album. The drums are pretty huge and lyrically it revolves around the lyric "There's people downstairs, I’m more than a fighter you know" - take from that what you will.

I Became A Prostitute

This song was pretty much fully formed when we took it into the studio. We knew it would be the first single taken from the album. It was probably not a great idea to call it 'I Became A Prostitute' for stuff like radio, press etc. To be honest I don’t see what the fuss is, it is the politically correct term for a lady of the night. The title has no sexual connotations, it’s a metaphor for becoming something that you don’t want to become and there is nothing you can do about it.

Seven Years Of Letters
This was one of the first songs we wrote for the album and is the second single (19 October). It’s got our first guitar solo I think, well as close as we can get to having a guitar solo in a song. The lyrics in the song revolve around running away from things and people. It’s a song that we have played live for about a year now and always seemed to go down well at gigs, especially on our tour of America with Mogwai.

Made To Disappear
This song has the album title in the lyrics and really came together in the studio. I don’t really remember writing it, but it was always going to be on the record. This song probably has the darkest lyrics on the album.

Scissors
Scissors is an instrumental. Don’t really know what instruments are on it, it’s pretty intense and one of my favourites on the album, as I don’t sing on it. We felt it was important to have instrumentals that helped the album flow and so it was more than just a collection of songs.

The Room
This was originally untitled '27' from our The Twilight Sad Killed My Parents And Hit The Road EP for the two Mogwai tours we did. It was the first song written for this record and has taken many forms over its two years of existence. We knew it was a good song but it took us some time to realize that we just had to let the song speak for itself instead of trying to complicate it. It was written during a particularly dark time as well.

That Birthday Present
It’s the fastest song we have ever written and will probably ever write. It features Laura from My Latest Novel on violin. It’s the complete opposite to ‘The Room’ as it hits you between the eyes straight away with the noise. It’s probably one of my favourite songs to play live.

Floorboards Under The Bed
This started off as two separate songs. We decided to piece them together and it turned out to be one of the most claustrophobic songs we have. It starts of with me walking about the studio singing on my own and closes with a piano instrumental and noise. Laura also helps out again on the violin.

Interrupted
This was probably the last song we wrote for the album. It has overlapping vocal melodies and again was just an idea before it became its fully formed self in the studio. Again the lyrics are pretty dark, with lines about "burying people" and "feeding them to dogs". The main lyric is "you and I".

The Neighbours Can’t Breathe
This song was again taken from The Twilight Sad Killed My Parents And Hit The Road EP. On that it was a live version, it’s one of the first songs that we played live from this record and hasn’t really changed too much since then. We added some keys and changed the drum pattern a little. The song title is a lyric from the song and I think it’s the first time we have done that. The vocals have a different affect on this song to the rest of the album as well.

At The Burnside
This song was always going to finish the album. The lyrics revolve around a story that my dad told me and I related that back to my situation at the time. The drums are heavily distorted and I am pretty sure that Mark is hitting some fire extinguishers in the background. It opens and closes with a dark piano line. It was the perfect way to end this album in my eyes.

Words: James Graham
Photograph: Su Anderson

The Twilight Sad's second album Forget the Night Ahead is released on 5 October through Fatcat.

Track by track: There Will Be Fireworks

There Will Be Fireworks: It's not so much a name as a statement of intent.

The Glaswegian quartet - consisting of Nicholas McManus (above), Gibran Farrah, David Madden and Adam Ketterer - coil shimmering melodies around escalating post-rock structures to create music that mortar strikes your very core.

Somehow unsigned, the band release their self-produced debut LP today (1 July). And before the eponymously-titled record hurtles into the public sphere like an atomic bomb, UtR caught up with frontman Nicholas McManus to get the track-by-track lowdown on this astonishing album.

[The band were kind enough to allow us more or less free reign with the MP3s we chose to include, but we think it's only fair that some of the album is kept aside for those of you who go out and buy it.]

1. Colombian Fireworks

The spoken word part was written and performed by Kevin MacNeil, the author of The Stornoway Way. He came to one of our gigs, and I asked if he fancied doing us a wee turn a la Edwin Morgan on Idlewild’s The Remote Part. Happily, he agreed and wrote the piece for the album, recording it on Shetland with his brother and sending the file to us.

2. So The Story Goes
Just before this starts, you can hear Marshall – the sound engineer – say “just go for it”. We like leaving things like that in. It’s the first song in which our friend Karen Fishwick plays trumpet. The vocals were recorded with my mouth literally an inch from the condenser mic, so you can hear every little nuance. The idea with that was to make it sound intimate because, lyrically, the song is quite intimate. And quite sad.

3. Midfield Maestro

This was one of the first songs we recorded and is the oldest on the album. Writing it was a bit of a turning point for us. We stumbled upon how we sound now by simplifying everything to write this song, and discovered a poise that we hadn’t had before. The song is named in honour of this little figurine I used to have of Diego Maradona. I got it in Asda when I was six or seven and used to put it on top of my amp but I left it in some smelly practice room and haven’t seen him for over a year. Gutted.

4. Guising

This is a quiet wee vignette-type-thing. Again, recorded with really close mics so you can hear every nuance and the, vaguely disgusting, noise of my mouth moving. The guitar and vocals were done live at the top of a stairwell. The weird noises are that of an ebow on an acoustic guitar, using a slide. It’s quite an innocent song in a way; really just a couple of random memories stuck together. Someone described it as ‘knowingly naïve’ which is probably about right.

5. Off With Their Heads

This segues straight in from Guising. We were really keen to have an album that flowed as much as possible – a complete work rather than a collection of songs – and a lot of the time there are no gaps between songs. This is probably the heaviest song overall. I think we wrote this song the night before we recorded it. Probably not a great idea but it worked out OK.

6. I Like The Lights
This was the last song we recorded. Karen sings in it. We’ve got brass, strings, two drum parts and all sorts in it. It’s basically about when I was in Royal Exchange Square in Glasgow at night time with someone. I really do like the lights there – they’re pretty. It’s a very short song so there isn’t much to say about it except that it took me ages to get the piano right in the bit where everything kicks in because I have useless stubby sausage fingers.

7. A Kind of Furnace
This was the first primarily piano-led song we wrote. The spoken word part in the interlude is a passage from the Ian McEwan novel Enduring Love, spoken by Marshall the soundman using a really cool mic that looked like a walky talky. There’s a random accordion and organ progression at the end which we put in for a laugh because we found an accordion and thought it would be in some way wrong not to use it.

8. We Sleep Through The Bombs

After the rather sprawling nature of A Kind of Furnace, this is a welcome tune. The reverby guitar noise at the start was recorded by facing an amp into the hollow of a big piano. It probably doesn’t make much of a difference to how it sounds but we like to experiment with daft things like that and pretend we’re mad sonic pioneers like Phil Spector, but with better hair and less mental.

9. Headlights
Another piano led song. It’s quite striking, with quite a distinctive guitar line. The weird voices are Gibran singing wordlessly, with backwards reverb on. Basically, we recorded him singing gibberish, reversed the gibberish, put some hefty reverb on it, then put the gibberish back the right way round.

10. We Were A Roman Candle
Another vaguely angsty tune – I should really cheer up. I really loved recording the vocals because I got to scream like a maddy, which is always fun. A recording studio is the one place where you can shout and scream ‘til your heart is content and people actually say ‘well done, that was good’. After it, my vocal chords were torn to shreds and the next day I had a sexy husky voice. Sadly, it’s back to normal.

11. Says Aye

Probably the most optimistic song on the album. It’s about a kind of stupid wild optimism; a wide-eyed hope, but a good one. The little sample at the end is Edward R. Murrow; we found a random US Government infomercial from the 1950s about the threat of nuclear warfare that he had narrated. We couldn’t resist putting it in.

12. Foreign Thoughts

This is the poppiest moment on the album which is a bit paradoxical because of the weird instrumentation. David plays a non-bassy bass part, using a slide and a since-deceased delay pedal. Gibran used a really old, really cheap Yamaha keyboard played through a guitar amp. This is the one I’m most proud of lyrically – it’s basically a stream of consciousness but I like the scansion and the flow.

13. Joined Up Writing
Another optimistic song. At the end, when everything is fading out, I did a little raggedy acoustic bit, which is lyrically and melodically a throwback to Foreign Thoughts. It was intended as a not-very-subtle homage to the end of In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel – I thought the way Jeff Mangum references back to Two Headed Boy at the album’s close was stunning and shamelessly pillaged the idea.

Words: Nicholas McManus (and Billy Hamilton)

The album launch is at Nice'n'Sleazy, Glasgow tonight (1 July), with support from Lions.Chase.Tigers and We Hung Your Leader.

You can buy the album online here.

Will there be fireworks? Discuss...