The Twilight Sad: The Room - Single Review

I generally wait til a bit closer to release to review stuff, but since the video for The Room is doing the rounds and is very pretty I wanted to show it off, so this has been bumped up the review schedule a bit.
Early versions of The Room and b-side The Neighbours Can’t Breathe originally appeared as Untitled #27 and Untitled #28 respectively way back in 2008 on The Twilight Sad Killed My Parents And Hit The Road, before being spruced up for inclusion on last year's Forget The Night Ahead album, so both songs have been around for a while.

The Room previously grabbed me the standout track on an album full of excellent songs when listening to Forget The Night Ahead. Repeated listens and time haven't changed that.
Centred around thumping drums and piano, and gradually descneding into an aural assault as more layers of noise join in, including an appearance by My Latest Novel's Laura McFarlane. The Room is both beautiful and terrifying. James Graham doesn't do storytelling lyrics, leaving the listener to project their own meaning on to his words, and in the case of The Room the music and lyrics mesh perfectly to take me to dark, unsettling places, in part influenced by Hubert Selby Jr's novel of the same name.
Claustophobic, unsettling, but undeniably gorgeous at the same time, The Room is as far as you can get from a disposable four minute pop song.

The Neighbours Can’t Breathe back up The Room on the single, in a stripped back acoustic form.
With the volume dialed down and the distorted guitars stripped off the song is down to bare bones, just acoustic guitar and vocals. A million miles away from the album version, and from Untitled #28 for that matter, and none the worse for it. Like the A-side, it is gorgeous, but thankfully a whole lot less sinister.

The Room is out on 7" and download through FatCat on 15th April, you can pre-order the single here. Watch the video after the jump.

Have a wee look at the video too.





The Twilight Sad - The Room from TLOBF.COM on Vimeo. It was directed by Nicola Collins and features David Lynch’s grand-daughter.

The Twilight Sad - MySpace