The Twilight Sad’s 2007 debut album, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, firmly placed them in Scotland’s tradition of intensely literate sad bastards (Big Country, Belle & Sebastian, Arab Strap). But the quartet spend most of their follow-up in hiding. Their crashing, shimmering walls of guitar are now simply a persistent, feedback-drenched drone, obscuring any sense of melody or dynamics. The always-twee lyrics (sample line: “You are the bearer of a womb without love”) have become stubbornly obtuse. Moments of transcendence occasionally emerge from the murk, but not often enough.
