The Twilight Sad
Album: Òran Mór Session
Label: FatCar
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.thetwilightsad.com

Where usually we'd expect to find a whole lotta shakin' going on The Twilight Sad have instead delivered a fair amount of quakin' on this quietly brooding monster of a record that affirms their growing cult status.

Recorded at the Glasgow arts venue that gives the album its name, singer James Alexander Graham and guitarist Andy MacFarlane dismantle key tracks from The Twilight Sad's universally acclaimed fourth album, Nobody Wants To be Here and Nobody Wants To Leave, rework a couple of b-sides and appropriate Arthur Russell's I Couldn't Say It To Your Face so effectively it all but becomes their own.

In clumsier hands or with lesser songs this would be some turgid 'unplugged' exercise, but the Òran Mór Session allows the emotional heart of these songs to come to the fore. And it's raw stuff.

Stripped of the vast riffs and ferocious delivery, Nobody Want To Be Here… reveals its delicate skeleton clinging to Graham's powerful vocal for support and yet just when it seems the song will collapse on itself MacFarlane's guitar drone takes the strain. Last January is delivered in a similar vein, the fragile arpeggios somehow underpinning the bruised lyrical content.

Leave the House is beautifully augmented by a distant piano that could have felt like an over-decoration alongside the sparseness of the rest of the set, but doesn't. It's perfectly judged. As is the cover of I Couldn't Say It To Your Face that closes the album - if anything it finds even greater depth and poignancy in Russell's stirring music and chilling lyrics that somehow also taps into the original's quiet note of hopefulness.

To some extent Òran Mór Session will be viewed as a companion piece to Nobody Wants To be Here and Nobody Wants To Leave, not least because it first appeared in abridged form earlier this year to accompany the band's live dates, but it actually stands apart from that album's monumental bluster and shows the songs in a different light that will thrill fans and tantalise newcomers.

Nick Churchill