Initial Thoughts: The Twilight Sad – Forget The Night Ahead

Exclusive Initial Thoughts Review: The Twilight Sad – Forget The Night Ahead

Words: Gareth O’Malley

After a long wait, one of my most highly anticipated releases of 2009 has finally surfaced. The Twilight Sad’s ‘Forget The Night Ahead’ leaked last Friday, but if you want a listen, you can listen to the stream on the FatCat Records website. Brilliant move, guys.

We liked ‘Reflection of the Television’, released as a free download in May. Quite a menacing song, it also showed us The Twilight Sad MK. II. On ‘Forget The Night Ahead’, the band have opted for immediacy over brooding soundscapes, and it’s a move that seems to have definitely paid off. I would say that I prefer this to debut ‘Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters’ at this point, but I can see myself becoming unable to choose one over the other in the coming months, as the two albums are remarkably different to each other; ‘Forget The Night Ahead’ is a much more direct affair. I will be letting you know what I think in a more in-depth way when I tackle reviewing this around the end of next month. For now, though, I’ll focus on three songs, all quite different from each other.

Shuffled///

Reviews of three randomly-selected tracks from ‘Forget The Night Ahead’

#1 – I Became A Prostitute

‘There’s a girl in the crowd, and she’s bawling her eyes out / The only girl in the town with her fingers in eyelids’ – dark lyrical content is glossed over by a chiming guitar line on this track, the album’s lead single. It is a colossal track, just what is needed after the ominous tones of ‘Reflection of the Television’. There is definitely a lot more emphasis on the guitars on this album, and it is tracks such as this one, and second single ‘Seven Years of Letters’ – due October 19th – that best exemplify this.

86%

#2 - That Room

A track that builds from almost Coldplay-esque beginnings. Probably the most anthemic-sounding song the band have written to date, it features one of the choruses of 2009 – ‘You’re the grandson’s toy in the corner / Don’t tell anyone else, that you were seen in the cherry tree / Look what you have done’. A cathartic, and yet oddly anticlimactic, track – seemingly the standout here.