The Twilight Sad "That Summer, At Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy"

I actively try to stay away from over-hyperbolic championing on this site, and I also work to avoid placing songs and bands in direct competition with one another. I won't try very hard to-day. As rock music goes, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters is stunningly majestic, sweeping and thunderous; of the same ilk as, but just fucking blowing away in every way imaginable, that dense, pretentious new Arcade Fire record. The comparison is fruitful for another reason, though; Fourteen combines the best moments of Funeral's foggy youthful recollection, re-approaches it as briny literary realism (just dig those song titles), and rocks harder (also with accordion!) than Neon Bible could if played through stadium speakers in a basement. I mean come on: with rock music, the personal is always more intriguing than the political. Even the album cover looks like a scandalously detailed melodrama of the first fifth of a life lived: that fifteenth winter marked some sort of massive scary segue into a new phase. To my ears, this record is the story of that fifteenth winter. Instead of heart-on-sleeve, though, the Sad are knife-in-chest, and James Graham's ragged, irresistable Scottish dialect is the final twist. "That Summer..." (mp3) is retroactive fury: clenched fists, directionless pacing, and half-heard mumbles through bedroom walls finally explained and explored from a vantage point benefitting from maturity. The drums throb, the accordion wheezes dramatically, then all of a sudden, the guitars just send the whole thing up in a torrent of flames. There are times when a really great song will temporarily forestall my appreciation of an entire record and I'll just keep rewinding the same song over and over, not wanting to know if it gets topped later, or stands by itself. This is just a fucking amazingly great song, so sorry for getting all bloggy about it. Come on, you know you can't resist singing along: "the kids are on fire, IN THE BEDROOM!"

Buy Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters from Fat Cat here.