I was so excited to find a prerelease of The new Twilight Sad CD yesterday in my inbox. I’m loving their evolving sound, especially the 80’s Factory-esque synths.
I’m hoping Phil might right up a full album review soon, but in the meantime, you’ll find a link to my favorite track, “Another Bed” after the jump.
Download: Another Bed – The Twilight Sad
“We wanted to be a lot more spontaneous, get outside our comfort zone – not to fall back into repeating what we’ve done previously”, explains MacFarlane. “So we moved to London for a month to record at The Pool and got Andrew Weatherall involved to bounce ideas off and to generally reassure us of the direction we were already progressing in – toward a sparser sound, with a colder, slightly militant feel.”
Under the guidance of Weatherall the band experimented with vintage analogue synths – borrowed from Ben Hillier – to work on the core sounds they wanted, finding inspiration too in the distinctive production style of innovators like Martin Hannett and Conny Plank. For the first time the drums were also recorded separately utilising a lot of synthetic effects which allowed for the easy manipulation of the sounds and samples later in the process. Stylistically, the guitars tend to refract John McGeogh (Magazine/ Banshees) or Keith Levene (PiL) rather than the ‘wall of sound’ approach that defined The Twilight Sad’s previous recordings.
I love the fact that there’s both a production and an anti-production credit!
Produced by The Twilight Sad
Anti-Produced by Andrew Weatherall
No One Can Ever Know is out 2/7 on FatCat
