The Twilight Sad

Record: Fourteen Autumns, Fifteen Winters

Those of us in the need for a deep Scottish brogue and the requisite accompanying compulsion to drink excessively and text our sleeping colleagues with semi-coherent messages of glee and fleeting enthusiasm for the evening's inevitable debauchery will find solace in the notion that we are not alone in this feeling.
The lulling plink of a piano, the droning distorted guitar, and the driving rhythm of drums and repeated lyrical mantras ("where are your manners? where are your manners?") round out the sound, only to be punctuated by the distinctly perfectly out of place yet perfectly orchestrated accordion. Yes, accordion.
I was fortunate enough for this little gem to be stumbled upon me, rather than the opposite, by a colleague whose knack for picking up on music is rivaled only by his seeming lack of discretion in purchasing the same. A recent example is a collection of mid-70s powerpop one hit wonders you've never heard, and would be perfectly content to never hear. Nonetheless, I've found this record in heavy rotation (can we say rotation in this era of iPods?) both in study and in recreation.
Finding the correct volume can be somewhat tricky, as some tracks, notably the opener "Cold Days From The Birdhouse," start out on the soft side before building in classic shoegazer fashion into over-driven rock only to fade out once again. My suggestion is to simply turn it up, and leave it there.