The Twilight Sad — Forget The Night Ahead

Certain producers leave a very identifiable mark on the discs they handle. A minute into the first song on Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's Some Loud Thunder, any listener familiar with Dave Fridmann's work should be able to declare, "Yep, this is a Fridmann album."

The same can be said of ex-Delgado drummer Paul Savage, who co-produced Forget The Night Ahead. The forthrightness and hollow thumping of Savage drums are unmistakable.

The Twilight Sad's second full-length starts much like this year's debut from fellow Scots, Popup — a plucked electric guitar accompanied by vocals with an unabashed Scottish drawl. But near the end of that first song, The Twilight Sad drop a devastating chorus of noise that can only be described as a herd of guitars dying a slow painful death. Imagine Mogwai playing "Christmas Steps" just slightly out of tune.

That dissonance (it's somehow enjoyable, by the way) acts as an unwavering background for the next several tracks. At the disc's midpoint, a suddenly-inserted piano brings things down to a less jarring level, but only briefly.

This is a wholly cacophonous disc — on par noise-wise with Japandroids — that punishes without sacrificing melody.

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