The Twilight Sad seem to be one of those bands that remain niche and somewhat divisive. But those who are into them are really into them, and with good reason. They’ve been long championed by Robert Smith and have access to a huge, huge audience following epic tours supporting The Cure, but they obstinately refuse to tone down their overt Scottishness, and they stubbornly refuse to bend to any kind of commercial leanings, or to cheer the fuck up. They’re also one of the most emotionally intense bands around: their live shows are quite simply something else.
‘Designed to Lose’ is the second single from their next album, and simultaneously harks back to the blistering welter of noise that was their second album No One Can Ever Know, while pushing forward on the trajectory of their last album, It Won/t Be Like This All The Time, which was both glorious and harrowing as fuck.
It Won/t Be Like This All The Time was released in 2019, so it’s been a long wait for new material. Oh, but this is worth it. The Twilight Sad aren’t a band to rush-release something sub-par, and ‘Designed to Lose’ is classic Sad on first listen, and just gives more with each play.
I have to eject and check the disc to make sure I’ve not bobbed in New Order’s debut after hitting ‘play’ on this CD. I haven’t, but The Vaulted Skies have that whole c.1980 sound down to a tee, with the clinical rhythms and steely synths shaping the landscape.
The Vaulted Skies – as if the band name wasn’t indication enough – plunder the seam of the dark post punk style that occupied the first half of the 80s, and – while a roll-off touchstones and reference points feels a shade reductive, it’s entirely relevant and appropriate to namecheck The Rose of Avalanche and Rosetta Stone.
The opener, ‘Does Anyone Else Feel(Strange)? culminates in an explosive kaleidoscope of retro synth and thunderous drums that calls to mind ‘Walk Away’ by The Sisters of Mercy and this overtly gothy groove carries through the other three songs on this EP. ‘The Night’ lurches and lunges and bucks over a thick, warping bass groove.
When they slow it down and do the sparse atmospheric thing, as on ‘The Falling Man’, The Cure’s Faith looms large as an influence, with heavy traces of Japan in the mix. Whoever described them as ‘the lovechild of Robert Smith and Boy George’ was at least half right.
And this is where, as a critic, the duel between objectivity and subjectivity sets its markers and gets to tussling. Objectively, it’s derivative and by-numbers. Subjectively, it’s got a gloomy emotional draw and a certain tension. Objectively, it’s well-executed. Subjectively, those nagging guitar parts and basslines hit the spot. So where you do go?
From a purely personal perspective – and if truth be told, and response to music has to be personal – the technicalities and matters of production count for nothing when a work hits and resonates on a personal, emotional level, which is never remotely objective or rational, but always instinctive, gut-driven. And when aspects of my personal life are difficult, I invariably find I’m prone, if not to regression per se, but to a certain tendency toward nostalgia. And all of the acts The Vaulted Skies draw on, intentionally or otherwise, pull me back to being 15-21. My formative years, my musical discovery years, my goth years – years I never fully left.
Do I get a sense of actual nostalgia from this? No. members of The Vaulted Skies probably weren’t born when any of the aforementioned bands were in existence, or even in the early 90s. It’s not their fault they were born too late. They cannot control time or style. But they cannot control their musical output, and it completely does it for me.
Aural Aggravation 