Over the years,
the Twilight Sad
have mastered many flavors of brooding and bittersweet, from their debut album
Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters
' folky atmospheres to
No One Can Ever Know
's hard-edged electronics. They've been around long enough to look back, and that's what they do on
Nobody Wants to Be Here and Nobody Wants to Leave
. Inspired by their late-2013 and early-2014 live performances of
and with their songwriting honed by
No One
's stark experiments,
transform everything that came before into some of their most compelling music. By blending the extremes of their previous albums, they give intimate moments an epic scope in ways that sound truly revitalized. As the title implies,
captures the point in a relationship when staying together and breaking up sound equally appealing and terrible. It's an emotional state detailed by bleakly beautiful songs ranging from the dramatic post-punk of "There's a Girl in the Corner," "Last January," and "I Could Give You All That You Don't Want" to the lusher but just as haunted sounds of the swooning "Pills I Swallow" and the title track's brilliant shoegaze, which sounds like
My Bloody Valentine
's "Soon" with all of its hushed romance turned into pleading. Lyrically, the group also uses all the tools at its disposal to convey the album's conflicting moods: singer
James Graham
is alternately callous and wounded throughout, whether delivering wry barbs like "I put you through hell/But you carry it oh so well" on "Drown So I Can Watch" or simply baring it all on "Sometimes I Wished I Could Fall Asleep," where the ghostly echo on his voice when he sings "There's nothing left for us" is painfully vulnerable. Equally desolate and majestic,
's naked emotions and sophisticated music mark a new high point for
. ~ Heather Phares