The Twilight Sad
It’s the Long Goodbye
Rock Action Records
Seven years have passed since The Twilight Sad’s last album, It Won’t Be Like This All the Time, and in that span, both bad luck and good have been visited upon singer/lyricist James Graham. As his spirits were temporarily buoyed by dream tours with The Cure, his mother’s declining health and subsequent death, as well as his own crumbling mental state, left him shaken and shattered.
Picking up the pieces, Graham and Twilight Sad co-conspirator Andy MacFarlane gradually chipped away at It’s the Long Goodbye, with help from newcomers David Jean, an occasional collaborator with Arab Strap, on drums and Nation of Language bassist Alex Mackay, also part of Mogwai’s live contingent. It’s hard to imagine a more cathartic form of therapy than erecting epic wailing walls of shoegazing, post-punk sound with The Twilight Sad, as the devastating emotional floods and direct, poetic entreaties of It’s the Long Goodbye are almost drowned in massive, undulating surges of torrential guitar crunch and dark, melodic currents.
Searching questions are posed amid the powerful, unfolding drama of the sprawling, intensely personal record, as a grieving Graham and his rich, mellifluous vocals walk steadily through sudden cloudbursts, although he seems to float by the quasars and across the vast, starry expanses of “The Ceiling Underground” to ask, “Will you dream with me?” and “Why do I feel like nothing is real?” Just as Graham’s heightened anguish and existential confusion threaten to take hold of him, MacFarlane gnashes his instrumental teeth in a show of solidarity, showering acid rains upon his partner’s carefully chosen words and thick Scottish brogue, sending him hurtling into full-on sonic gales. And when the flowing synth-pop of “Inhospitable Hospital” shadows Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and a similarly cast “Waiting for the Phone Call” pulses with darkwave urgency, galloping through one of MacFarlane’s wildest downpours, any notion of a power struggle between them disappears in the slipstream.
Birthed in a nest of noise, pushed by blocky, ominous rhythms echoing Joy Division’s brooding, brutalist architecture, “Dead Flowers” eventually is swallowed by black sheets of frenzied riffing and other swirling debris, while the insistent drive of “Designed to Lose” cuts straight through the tumult and a woozy, sweeping “Chestwound to the Chest” nakedly contemplates loss and how to move on. “I keep hiding in my nightmares,” admits Graham in the closer “TV People Still Throwing TVs at People,” a minor-key, piano dirge awash in dizzying effects that explodes in a crashing cacophony of urgency and crisis. Come out wherever you are, Graham, even if you’re barely keeping your head above water.
Practicing familiar loud-soft dynamics, “Attempt a Crash Landing” shifts from barely restrained calm to violent electrical lightning and thunder, Graham’s pleading voice rising above the din. When the lovely, visceral squall of opener “Get Away From it All” hits with all its mighty fury, it could knock anyone back, Graham included.
Another tour de force from The Twilight Sad, and possibly their greatest triumph, It’s the Long Goodbye marshals all of their strengths and finds their creative energy hasn’t waned. One wonders when, or if, the well will run dry.
