FIVE STUNNING BITS OF MUSIC THAT FORMED THE DEBUT RELEASE

I will get round, eventually, to Part 19 of the series that looks at five great LP tracks by a band or singer.  But for today, I wanted to instead feature five songs by The Twilight Sad, one of the many great bands to come out of Scotland in the 21st Century.

And like so many of their peers, The Twilight Sad aren't ashamed to write and record songs that are about their immediate environment nor do they shy away from delivering the vocals in their own hugely distinctive accents. 

In September 2005, the band sent a four-song demo to the Brighton-based indie label Fat Cat Records whose owner soon headed up to Glasgow to watch them play live in what was only their third ever gig and signed them straight afterwards.  What happened next was probably unique for any UK indie band on a UK indie label.......the debut record was only released in the USA!!!

November 2006 was the date for the release of The Twilight Sad EP, a collection of five songs which were recorded in Glasgow and which built on the demos which had caught the attention of their record label bosses. But it would be another five months before anything was officially made available in the UK with a debut single and LP. As I said, quite unique.....

Three of the songs on the debut LP (or at least different mixes of them) would appear on the debut material made available at home, but the opening and closing tracks weren't available any other way.  Thankfully, neither the band nor their label are the type to insist fans shell out fortunes for the difficult to track down material (not so far anyway!!) and the debut EP was made available in UK record stores:-


mp3 : The Twilight Sad - But When She Left, Gone Was The Glow
mp3 : The Twilight Sad - That Summer, At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy
mp3 : The Twilight Sad - Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard
mp3 : The Twilight Sad - And She Would Darken The Memory
mp3 : The Twilight Sad - Three Seconds Of Dead Air

As I've said before, I picked up on the band just as I was leaving to go and work in Canada for a few months back in 2007.  I did take their debut LP along with me, but I didn't buy any of their actual singles until well after I came back which disqualified them from being included in my personal run-down of my all-time favourite 45s that featured on TVV in early-mid 2008.  If I hadn't been the purist who insisted singles had to have been bought at the time of release for consideration on the chart, then the majesty of That Summer...... would have been gotten itself a very healthy entry.

I've read that the band themselves consider their sound is folk with layers of noise.  That's a perfect description of the debut EP. It's 26 quite stunning minutes of sound.