Goff's Pick of the Week- Fourteen Autmns and Fifteen Winters

Lets start with the tracklist off of the album:

1. "Cold Days from the Birdhouse"  

 2. "That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy"  

3. "Walking for Two Hours"  

4. "Last Year's Rain Didn't Fall Quite So Hard"  

 5. "Talking with Fireworks / Here, It Never Snowed"  

 6. "Mapped by What Surrounded Them"  

7. "And She Would Darken the Memory"  

 8. "I'm Taking the Train Home"  

 9. "Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters"  

Now doesn’t that sound like something you would like to listen too? Sure not much can normally be deduced from an albums track listing, but in this case it can. On the album Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, the Twilight Sad create an atmosphere that is as wintery and as cold as the title suggests, and the names of the songs on the album reflect exactly that. Never have I known an album that so accurately captured the emotions and the feelings of its sound with its song titles alone. The album explores the naïve sadness of youth, but never once sounds like whining or complaining, but rather sincere honest discontent reminiscent of The Smiths. On top of that, the songs are sung in a thick Scottish accent, which only adds to the mysterious and vague qualities that often go along with youth and looking back. The singer hits every note with a calculated emotional precision, which only adds to the songs intensity. And unlike their contemporary Scottish indie bands Belle & Sebastian and Arab Strap, who are often whimsical or jovial, each song here is as serious as the next .

The music too hits every note just right. The band creates sort of a spacey swirling sound, like the breeze on a blustery winters day which could be described as lo-fi pop. The instrumentation is your average drums and guitar and bass, but on some of the songs like Cold Days from the Birdhouse a piano is thrown in to really flesh out the sound.  The Best moments on the album are the ones where the band can mimic the emotionality of the singer like during the climax of the song That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy which is as haunting as they come, as chilling as the title of the album suggests.

And then there is Last Years Rain Didn’t Fall Quite as Hard. Its not my favorite song on the album, not by a long shot, that right belongs to the previously mentioned That Summer, at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy. In fact Last Years Rain this song probably would have gone completely unnoticed in terms of recognition if not for the title. But isn’t it grand? It reads like a Robert Frost poem, Its rhythmic, all the words except for “didn’t”  have only one syllable. Anyway the Twilight Sad have  a real way of bringing attention to even their less attention grabbing tunes on the album, and overall it adds to the aesthetic and general feel to Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters.