Review: The Twilight Sad - Nobody Wants To Be Here and Nobody Wants To Leave
By Xavier Veccia, Managing Editor
[Fatcat; 2014]
Rating: 5/10
Key Tracks: “Leave the House,” “There’s a Girl in the Corner”
Remember when it was cool to be aloof and hide your feelings? Well, those days are long gone. It’s rad to be sad, hip to let your tears drip, fly to cry, etc. This must make The Twilight Sad the coolest band around.
Since the days when Morrissey ruled, it’s been hard to find a collection of melancholy music so relatable. Although The Twilight Sad hasn’t quite reached the level of The Smiths, it's come damn close with three critically-acclaimed albums over the past seven years, ranging from the shoegazey Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters to the more industrial No One Can Ever Know.
With an already impressive career leading up to Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave, there was legitimate hope the Scottish sad boys would take another step forward. Instead, they released their most boring album to date.
In the past, The Twilight Sad has experimented with instrumentation, taking a different approach with each album; Nobody Wants to Be Here feels much more static.There are songs that keep the same pace and rhythm the entire time and that pace and rhythm isn’t all that complex in the first place.
By dumbing down the melody, the trio certainly does create a more minimalistic and dark atmosphere to house James Graham’s emotional Scottish drawl. The combination does sound good together, but that leaves Nobody Wants to Be Here almost completely in Graham’s hands.
Such a strategy does pay off in some regards. The opening track “There’s a Girl in the Corner” has Graham going back and forth between hushed murmurs and powerful wails to help ease the listener into the sorrowful world inhabited by The Twilight Sad.
“Leave the House” is another powerful example of Graham’s talents. For the first half of the song, “Leave the House” feels like just another static showcase. However, Graham belts out the chorus just as the melody becomes more basic. The contradicting combination is the best part of one of the best songs on the album.
This approach has its faults. “In Nowheres” is a good example of this, on which Graham’s voice is buried underneath repetitive instrumentation and also less impressive in its timbre. This makes for a dull song that bogs the listener down in the middle of the album.
Although Nobody Wants to Be Here is far from The Twilight Sad’s best album, it still provides some entertaining and catchy songs. Even “In Nowheres” is followed by an intriguing return to shoegaze in the title track. However, between Graham’s crisp vocals and the monotonous melodies, The Twilight Sad’s fourth album finds a comfortable middle that makes the title more appropriate than they meant it to be. I don’t really want to be listening to this, but they’ve made it hard to leave.
