The GB Album Club 002- Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters by The Twilight Sad

Awrite duders! (Did I use "awrite" correctly, Scots?) Welcome to part two of the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club! For our first pick, we punched some racists and threw up some tags with 2 Mello’s Sounds of Tokyo-To Future. This week, we wallow in the intangible tragedies of our youths with Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters by Scottish band The Twilight Sad! This album was selected by @shindig, and you can find some links to listen to it below:

Spotify

Apple Music

Bandcamp

Youtube

To participate in the Unofficial Giant Bomb Album Club, all you need to do is listen to the album and write your thoughts below! But if you want to go one step further, join our Discord, where you can talk music and throw your own picks into our album pool. We pick each album to listen to from the pool at random, but if you want to make a bunch of strangers listen to something you love (or hate!), that would be the way to do it! We covered breakbeat last week and shoegaze this week, but we got all sorts of stuff coming up. Djent, electro-pop, MPB, you name it! So come hang.

So this album didn't do it for me at first.

Part of it was coming to it for the first time in 2022. So many acts in the post-punk/indie/whatever scene have put out albums that sound like this since 2007, and it's hard for me to not think of it as a little dated. But then again, in 2007, I was too focused on being an extraordinarily obnoxious underground hip hop kid, and I wouldn't have appreciated it at the time either. In the alternative reality where I was reading more music criticism and had a more open mind, I'm sure I would've loved it. But we don't live in that reality. (Also in 2007, I was in middle school.) So for the first third or so of this album, I was sorta dismissive of it.

However, something changes when you're listening to an album for a club and you have to say something semi-coherent about the experience. I found myself listening a little more actively, trying to pay a little closer attention to the lyrics and all that. (Insert thick Scottish accent joke.) I found myself picking up on themes of adolescence and youth. Of regret and sorrow. Of obsessing over that thing you did or said when you were young that caused someone pain, and though you're a different person now, you still feel a pang when you think about it.

Suddenly, the experience changed. Before, I simply dismissed the big cathartic moments of loud shoegaze as "Well, that's what you do on one of these Pitchfork-y albums." But then those same moments started making me think of dramatic episodes from my high school days and times I was feeling low. I found myself wanting to project onto the vague lyrics a little more, and I was more willing to meet it on its own terms. In short, it hit.

I still think it's an album very much of its time, and were I betting man, I'd bet that I'd like some of their later stuff a little better. When they have more time to evolve their sound and try new ideas. But Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters got to me in the end. Sometimes, I'm a sucker for adolescent angst regardless of the trappings it comes in, and I found that sweet spot with this album. Eventually.

Favortie tracks: "And She Would Darken the Memory," "I'm Taking the Train Home," "Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters" (the last three tracks)

Alright, so... despite my strong preferences towards artists and genres that I've grown up with as a teen and discovered through last.fm as an adult, I like to think that I'm still capable of trying and appreciating new things; thus why I joined this club. ...Unfortunately, The Twilight Sad isn't one of those bands and Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters isn't one of those albums. Maybe I'm missing something since, checking Wikipedia, it reviewed pretty well. But after trying to listen to the album over the past few days, I kept losing interest.

@unclejam23: I was too hung up on the uninspiring instrumentals to bother reading though the lyrics, so thanks for bringing your lyrical analysis to the table. But even at that, there were so many bands in the emo and post-hardcore scenes in the mid 2000's that not only provide that level of catharsis/relatability lyrically, but also encapsulate those feelings with more interesting/catchy songwriting in regard to the instrumentals. I'm not saying that every band of the melancholic ilk has to have had a song featured in a Burnout game to be considered decent in my eyes, but I've heard a more complete package with 10 Years' debut album, The Autumn Effect, which came out in 05.

All fair. I have no doubt I can get what this album's offering elsewhere. In fact, I know I can and I have. I doubt I'm going to return to it any time soon and I don't feel some pressing need to go out of my way to defend it from someone who didn't connect with it.

But I don't know. For me, it's very much a case of something being more than the sum of its parts. I've heard better shoegaze. I've heard better indie rock. I've heard better forlorn ruminations on melancholic episodes of Scottish youth. But when they all come together, it works for me. It doesn't work better for me than something else hypothetically could (and has). But it works. Like I'll go 3.5/5.

Been listening to this album since it came out (when i was in high school). Quite a few of these Pitchfork bands I've stopped listening to over the years, but I keep coming back to this album. I love the combo of sad indie and noise/shoegaze. Also gets my vote for best use of accordian this side of Weird Al.

"The kids are on fire, in the bedroom."

I really didn't resonate with this album. The wall of sound and distortion on the instrumentals made it hard to focus on the lyrics. Additionally, I found many of the songs to be a minute or two longer than I personally enjoyed. I'm not sure if it was choruses repeating too many times or the long, distorted fade-outs that did it, but I was often done with a song before it was over. I think combing melancholy lyrics with oppressive production just overwhelmed me.

Damn I'm the lone defender. (Gives club Ewan McGregor sad eyes)

Nah, I've got your back. I mean, I can't dispute some of the criticisms. The lyrics are mushmouthed so I don't put that down to the distortion. As for long songs, She Will Darken the Memory has plenty of false finishes and I'd argue the album should've ended on it.

The Twilight Sad is probably the last band I got on at the ground level. I stumbled on them during a shoegaze kick and wanted something, anything with a bit of punch to it. That punch is provided, even if it's a bit mangled. When I was relisting to it, I had a thought:

This is like smashing your guitar up at the end of a gig, only to realise you've got two songs left. 23-year old me was into that. Current me is still into it but, when I think about great Twilight Sad songs, most of them come from over albums. This album resonates more, though. It's probably the nostalgia but their body of work is consistent, to me.

The unrelated to the music comment: sorry I missed the first thread. I saw the artist/album title, had no idea what it was, and balked like a coward.

The really short version of the undoubtedly many paragraphs to come: As the years have gone by, I often hear the words "Twilight Sad" and think the sounds of Frightened Rabbit or Future Islands in my head.

Expanded thoughts:

This was a prime time to hold your guitar as close to the amp as possible. But I also get it, without question. This was also a year when In Rainbows, Hissing Fauna, Strawberry Jam and Sound of Silver would arguably stake their claim to the sound(s) of mildly enjoyable rock music for over a decade. Even worse, at the time it did not feel that way! And why would it? These were concept records at worst, message records at best - popular artists young and old feeling the walls of internet message boards and the cities with regular live show assholes closing in on them. If anything, just looking back at this year has me finding newfound empathy for all the parents and silver fox influencer who've held on to music from their high school years. 2007 was my senior year and while I resist it with every fiber of my being, it's pretty clear that many of my peers are gonna ride whatever Spotify's interpretation of "Someone Great" is until they're covered in dirt or stuffed in an urn.

So if and when I try to boast some "I was a music critic from 2008 to 2013" credentials...ask for my papers, please. I'll gladly provide examples of all the ways I dodged having to write about rock music at this time. Compared to the lawlessness of mixtape era hip-hop or mechanical analysis of R&B, then as now criticizing rock music, perhaps most importantly, that which aimed towards being rock music, was and mostly remains a fool's errand (though plenty clever writers still have a good time making rock sound cooler than ever). I don't want it to die because expressive kids who can't play (program?) instruments, draw concept art or grasp the Adobe Creative Suite generally need a suitable and gratifying outlet. The best thing about rock music, from the modernly quaint enthusiasm of the many Black Americans of the '40s and '50s rejecting jazz so the despondent Brits of the '50s and '60s who commercialized it and on to the regional punks like Soul Glo and Black MIDI, is that even if it's not truly dangerous it can feel that way. The grander debt pop music owes to hip-hop, R&B and house, the more potent rock has started to become once again.

But I was glad not to be assigned Twilight Sad at what would've been the very new moon of my dream of music criticism. I mean fuck, Burial's Untrue, El-P's I'll Sleep When You're Dead and World's End Girlfriend's Hurtbreak Wonderland came out in 2007, let alone the four cultural titans I namedropped last paragraph! Perhaps more presciently, The National released Boxer and Spoon released Ga Ga Ga Ga and Bon Iver released For Emma (in the ways the Old Ones once strained to stuff every Neil Young record in a rock capsule, we Young Bastards must accept this record has been played by bands the size of E Street more than it hasn't), M.I.A. released Kala, Arctic Monkeys became a global menace and just for the sake of my self-loathing true shred-heads out there, Pig Destroyer established themselves as a blip on the radar with Phantom Limb.

In other words, I'd be happy to have some kid aged 16 to 50 with a messenger bag full of Apple brand charging cables for their phone, headphones, laptop and watch butt in on my conversation about Wet Leg and ask if I'd ever heard Twilight Sad before. I'd wearily avoid the long, dreary conversational road involving late period Sunny Day Real Estate and other slow but heavy emo bands that are far more relevant to the conversation than... Slowdive ... like Karate, Jawbreaker, Dag Nasty, Texas Is the Reason or Mineral. Because ultimately, a band like Twlight Sad and/or an album like Fourteen Autumns wasn't actually cynically designed to prey on guys like me who'd write a "review" like this understanding that others would fully get why the album itself wasn't, still isn't, worth talking about.

It's perfectly good, enjoyable, non-cynical and could've never expected to be the most generic entry to the canon of its moment. While I might argue there's no reason to like or dislike this album, it's worth nothing that as debut albums go it's baffling in its confidence, that as beginner's guides to a drowned sound it's both comprehensive and alluring, and that anybody who has anything negative to say about this album other than "heard it all before" record store guy-isms or "just not my jam" missives are either being a dick or honest.

6/10 without thinking about it, 7/10 if I still had to answer to editors who'd swap the more flowery language for song descriptions, 9/10 if I were becoming more and more desperate to book the mid-card for a late October festival in the Mediterranean regions of Europe.

@nodima:Yup, this is the exact discourse I missed in 2007 and the years after.

I was in early high school in 2007 (I miscalculated earlier). I was into late 90s/early 2000s neo-soul rap, emo hip hop from the Minneapolis scene, and a ton of random underground rap I found back when the apparatus of iTunes was still designed in such a way that it could lead you to genuine music discoveries if you knew where to look*. Given the social impetus that drove all that music and me having a shitty teenage attitude, I spent a lot of ill-informed years shunning anything with a guitar in it.

As a result, I came to all the big 2000s rock (or rock adjacent) releases later in life. On more than one occasion, I'd like or even love some album from that era, but then I'd find out that a lot of people who were paying closer attention to that arena of music have a much different relationship to it. I'd try to understand why, but the layers of discourse become so overlapping and so removed from the music itself that I just started rolling my eyes at a certain point.

I say all this not to criticize rock fans or pretend I'm above anything. (See: "I spent a lot of ill-informed years shunning anything with a guitar in it.") But because rock isn't my touchstone (or at least not then), I often find rock discourse fascinating. Case in point: The idea that this album was DOA before anyone knew it was DOA. It didn't occur to me now, and it definitely wouldn't have occurred to me then. In fact, this is the exact kind of album I would've used to try to infiltrate the "cool" music kids with (in the fantasy world where such kids existed at my school, so let's say the "cool" music 25+ year old teachers) and the fact that I think this leads me to think that I agree with everything you said.

It still struck a chord with me. But a very faint one.

*This includes El-P. I had Fantastic Damage on CD and I'll Sleep When You're Dead was a big deal to me at the time.

The closest thing to this that I’ve ever listened to is a few Deafheaven albums, which are all essentially a combination of black metal and shoegaze so “close” here actually means “several miles away”.

In 2007, I was a sophomore in high school. My listening habits at the time consisted mostly of Linkin Park, Disturbed, and a smattering of 80’s rock albums that I don’t listen to anymore. Later that year, I started getting into metalcore, primarily Underoath, Haste the Day, and As I Lay Dying, bands which did way more to inform my musical tastes than the Guns N’ Roses I had downloaded off of Limewire. So when people in this thread talk about this thing having been done before many times and better, I’m not really sure where I’d go looking for bands that do this but better.

And I’m not against looking for a better version of this. I think it’s all right. I wouldn’t listen to it on anything less than a really good sound system, though – the whole “oversaturated wall of sound” thing would probably sound like a muddy indecipherable mess on the speakers in my car. But I have a decent pair of headphones and I can parse it well enough to enjoy some of it on those.

I think this album does need a little something, though. I feel like a lot of the songs do last a little too long, but I don’t think they need to be shortened, necessarily. I think they need to have a little something else to them, a better hook, a chorus that digs its way into your ear and won’t go away, have the drummer change things up a little more often. It all sounds very similar and never goes anywhere interesting enough, and it seems like I'm not totally alone in that sentiment.

I think I actually prefer the previous pick, 2Mello’s Sounds of Tokyo-To Future. I didn’t like every song there, but I did enjoy significant portions of that album, and even when it was annoying me it was doing something interesting and unique.

I hate to be another downer on this thread, so let me first say that I talked about my musical traumas in my previous post, and long story short, indie rock is probably my least favorite genre of music. And even when it comes to rock in general it is a fairly short list of bands that I find acceptable. Aside of the Scottish accent which adds a bit of character to it, if you told me that this is Muse or Coldplay or anything else like that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I could absolutely see songs from this album being on my friends playlist in a house party around 2008, where they would then get mad at me if I wanted to hear one rap or pop song that entire evening.

People more versed in the genre can talk about this albums place in the history of the genre. This band does have a Wikipedia page so I see that this is their first album and as such it's probably a pretty good effort since there is nothing aggressively bad on it, it's perfectly acceptable background noise for me, it just doesn't get me going. My favorite song is probably "And She Would Darken The Memory" because that one stood out to me the most, and in a positive way.

@unclejam23: Yea, this is the sort of album that easily lives or dies by the context listeners bring to it. I went back and read your original comments and will admit that I’ve never been a huge lyric guy. Don’t get me wrong, I love an incredible line, verse, chorus - like you, I’m ultimately a hip-hop person at heart - but I rarely internalize them. Vocals tend to be another part of the music itself for many listens when I think back on albums. So definitely interesting that the writing gave you an avenue towards better appreciating this album.

But also: nailed it with the Pitchfork comment. This was what bands had to sound like to wind up on year end lists (and if I remember right, this album was a pretty frequent inclusion) and it should be noted that a lot of the cynicism or ambivalence I wrote about is in hindsight; this was a reasonably buzzy record back then.

But dated is also so exactly right - like I was trying to contextualize, this was a year when several bands wrote career defining records, threw a curveball into their discography or new artists gave critics a good shove towards a new image of what a standard critical darling might sound like. All these years later, this album feels timeless in that weird way where if you could say it was a forgotten LP from 1996 the narrative might completely change, but something about it being from 2007 elicits huge shrugs.

Here's the thing about first impressions, especially when it comes to music: they're not the most reliable thoughts and feelings in the world. I've said this multiple times, but there really are albums that need more than just a weekend before giving confident and definitive feedback on. Of course, depending on the listener, some artists and genres are easier to confidently analyze and critique than others, and apparently The Twilight Sad is one of those groups that needs a little more time than basically none at all for me to, for a lack of a better term, "get it" to the point of at least partially understanding and appreciating what they're doing. So with that said, my second attempt at listening to this album while playing GTA Online last night: it's an okay album in a vacuum, but having it listened to with a group and sharing ideas with them kinda makes this album greater than the sum of its parts in terms of my experience with it.

The first few weeks of the album club were filled with a lot of doubt as to whether or not I could be okay with what people were picking and seeing the 18 album long playlist as a test of endurance rather than looking at the randomness with excitement, and this was one of the albums that planted those seeds of doubt due to the album not resonating with me at all either. But because of Jam pointing out some of the lyrical themes as well as Shindig revealing where he was when discovering them, this album was more or less living in my head rent free because I was synonymizing this album with vulnerability and the notion of not adding an album to the pool because of accessibility, but instead for the personal feelings that someone gives to and gets from an album: like I have with Måsstaden Under Vatten and The Autumn Effect; that latter of which I swapped for Cannibal Corpse as a response to Fourteen Autumns to double down on having more honest-to-self picks. So between the acknowledgment of the feeling of looking a bit into Shindig's psyche, especially after the group has seen a bit of mine with Under Vatten and will again with The Autumn Effect (albeit from when I was in my second year of high school in 2005 when the album released), I felt as though this album was due for a more fair chance.

Due to the very wide variety of music that's featured in the Grand Theft Auto games, specifically 5, it seemed like a better environment to listen to album as opposed to painting or working out where I need to feed off of the adenine from more aggressive genres of music. It worked, to an extent. The album hasn't become a new favorite, but it was more enjoyable to listen to during this second attempt. I can say with certainty that I respect this album. I respect what it does even though I haven't latched on to any particular moment in the album, but rather letting the individual tracks meld together as a singular experience. As far as the sad music aspect goes, it's an album that I take more seriously than Fallen by Evanescence and Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory and Meteora because of how often their music have been at the butt of many jokes for the past 20 years though image macros and AMVs, though I personally wouldn't go to Fourteen Autumns when looking for catharsis. And when it comes to indie, I don't explore the genre so my mind can only go to Franz Ferdinand's eponymous album and Fantasies by Metric, but I'm not against adding this album to this list for the sake of having tried something that's outside of my comfort zone and getting a few things from it, albeit mainly because of the music club. Overall, this album is thoroughly okay and I would recommend giving it a try to anyone asking for indie, though said recommendation comes with the caveats of the album needing more time, patience, and a more open than usual mind to avoid writing it off, and I think it also bears mentioning that that band has most likely made albums that are easier to latch on to.