(Planet Me)
Saturday, December 08, 2018
 
THE TWILIGHT SAD : Brussels Botanique, Brighton Dome, London Bush Hall, Edinburgh Liquid Rooms 18-29 November 2018

You are, no doubt, sick of me talking about this band. But I am not. On the cusp of releasing their upcoming album “IT WON/T BE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME”, The Twilight Sad have become one of the most important bands to me. Across four shows – three headline appearances and one to support Mogwai – I see the band become even better than I think they have been before.

But why? Why come back? Why see a band so many times in such a short space of time? Why, if you want, keep picking at the scab of these feelings? Because we must. Their songs lean to the darkness, in the same way flowers don’t. But these songs also glow with a mixture of passion and despair : almost underlining a belief that somehow trying will help overturn the state of the world.

I’m not quite sure how to describe what this band do to me except in abstract, absolute terms, discussing things like feelings and emotions. The set is constructed around tension and release, around how each song ends being closely related to the start of the next one, and around the glorious sound they make. In some respects even though these are separate and discrete songs recorded – in some cases – a decade apart – they are also all part of a whole. For me, its not just the music, but the lyrics ; each song has a carefully sketched emotional temperature that speaks to my life in a way no other band really has ; “I want you, more than you will ever know” sums up years of my life. Since the lyrics are abstract, and non specific, they can apply to almost anything, but the songs speak the language of how I experience life.

There are four new songs played tonight, and surprisingly, the band are getting even better : “I/M NOT HERE” is a huge, rampaging beast around the strain of a relationship that any couple who has ever argued will relate to, “Videograms” is another pulsing song of tension and release, but the best of the new songs is “VTR” which – to me at least – speaks to me of the battles I personally have with mental health and hope, and in five lines sum up almost everything about how I experience depression :

“There's a monster inside of you
Someone that you never knew
And someone that we didn't choose
And he won't leave us alone
And please don't leave me alone “

It also helps that the music is glorious : a combination of incessant rhythms, atmospheric keyboards, basslines that are good as most bands main riffs (and, to be honest, very reminiscent of The Smiths strong and memorable basslines that were the envy of every band of the Eighties), alongside a fierce but precise squall of melodic feedback that drones like a horror movie soundtrack and sounds exactly like the roar in my head when the world goes away, or perhaps the mating call of some otherworldly monster. Oh, hyperbole! But it isn’t. Not to me. The band are wrapped inside the music, and – from the front row – I can audibly hear the singer lost off mic over the PA. I’m lost in the moment – and that is what I personally live for ; when money, health, and The Orange Fuhrer all fade away and nothing exists but art, feeling, emotion, and release. I feel lighter after every gig ; that I have in some way lost some of the weight of some fairly damn traumatic stuff.

And if I am honest – I think it is only those who have known heartbreak that comprehend art in its most effective way. I hate to generalise, but these songs feel like they are about loss, and hope, and battle, and sometimes to feel the art, you have to have lived through it ; otherwise it’s a distant intellectual concept, and not real. And oh boy, the feelings are real here. I’ve been hopebroken, heartbroken, and lived through the kind of wars and trauma that would break many people, and I made it, and I picked myself up, spat on the floor and growled to reality : “Is that the best you can do?”*

*well, I didn’t.

And eventually, life stopped fighting me. What doesn’t kill you may make you stronger, but every battle felt it was taking a part of me away, and it is only recently I’ve started growing back. The world tried to change me, and make me cruel, and it didn’t work. But I didn’t forget the battles. I survived the war, but at a cost. Which is why “Keep Yourself Warm” reduces me to a husk many nights, because I cannot listen to it without feeling a whole bunch of Survivors Guilt ; guilt that I survived my life, and other did not survive theirs. It doesn’t get easier, but it becomes more bearable : I know what’s coming, and it’s a long few minutes. I’m not alone in this crowd either. There’s plenty of bawling and feeling.

Every show is important ; every show is different. Brighton is a compact but exhausting race through a truncated set. London is a mixture of devout and the curious. Edinburgh is a fervent homecoming that borders on cathartic : and the best of the lot. At every show I am lost : lost in a way that I last was when I was seeing Underworld pull 3 hour latenighters in the late Nineties when all that really exists is the feeling, the moment, the here, the now, and the raw, and glorious release from the world that we all need in some way or other. You know that moment? The one we all chase. The one, if we are lucky, we find in family, friends, love, sex, alcohol, or music? That. That is what this band does to, and for, me.

There’s a Girl In The Corner
That Summer At Home, I Became The Invisible Boy
Don’t Move
I/M NOT HERE
Last January
The Arbor
Reflection of The Television
VTR
It Never Was The Same
Videograms
The Wrong Car
Keep Yourself Warm
Cold Days In The Birdhouse
And She Would Darken The Memory


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