The Twilight Sad - Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave

The Twilight Sad

Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave

27 October 2014

FatCat

 

2.5 stars out of 5

 

 

Yawn. Oh, umm, excuse me. It’s just my normal reaction when a record is just sort of there, neither good nor bad. Nobody Wants to Be Here and Listen to This Incredibly Dull Record is a good case in point. It’s frustrating because it’s so completely lacking in character that you can’t even complain about how bad it is, because it doesn’t even have bad qualities. It has no qualities at all. None. You know Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece of German literature, The Album Without Qualities? It’s about this thing.

 

A couple of weeks ago I bashed the new Foxygen record for being a complete mess. And, seriously, it’s a disaster. It’s pure agony. But this new Twilight Sad record? It’s not a mess at all. A mess implies that something happened and left behind an unpleasant result. Like a small scattering of dirt, or a dent, or even just a minor scuff. This record leaves behind nothing. The Foxygen record was memorable for how fucking awful it was. This record ended about thirty seconds ago and, seriously, I can’t remember a single melodic refrain or line of lyric. And I’ve listened to it three fucking times. I have zero recollection of what any of the songs could have been like, apart from that there were guitars, drums, and bass involved. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of rock music, where your body is permitted to leave but your memories are not. Probably aliens are involved, and this record is their way of hijacking your brain for forty-three and a half minutes. You’d be wise to avoid, unless you really want to believe.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger