The Glasgow frontrunners have a unique quality of creating songs that have the right credentials to become winning festival anthems and from what they have discussed in previous interviews about their fourth LP titled GLA (supposedly short for their home city of Glasgow which the album is centred around), is supposedly the beat that is closest to their Scottish hearts.
Sam McTrusty stated that “This album is our reflection of what it’s like to come from a city at the forefront of multiculturalism, both forward thinking and with a real sense of community, but also with a dark and rough history,” which is a more than respectable topic to tackle, but just like art and its controversial struggle between the contextual and visual balance, the instrumental is usually expected to measure up to the lyrical content. If both conflict then this symbolic city will be left with a few districts still under construction.
There is no denying that certain songs are regrettably monotonous in their design such as “Whispers”.
Although an irritating thought to slate a perfectly acceptable song, the long, overdrawn process seems hell-bent on fitting in too many chorus continuations and then ending with a play-over of a manipulated voice uttering underneath a harmonious background noise, which ends up lost in translation. The same can be said for “Missing Link”, lacking firm hooks which leave it developing into a droning rhythm.
Firmly removing this rough plaster however and making note of these structural flaws, the rest of this raw and heart-pumping piece really encapsulates the real progressive side of Twin Atlantic.
“You Are The Devil” has an instrumental face similar to picturing the Devon trio known as Muse taking an exceedingly long trip up North and returning with more than just a new collection of tartan attire. With vocal-led verses and a punchy chorus that forces heads to bob, they certainly won’t be taking any punishment in terms of criticism on this track.
Songs with the title “A Scar To Hide” are never not going to be something emotionally basted with woes of poor personal experience, but with an acoustic guitar and symphony orchestra marriage thrown into the mix to efficiently get the teenage tears building, this music was created to become their lighter-raising (or modern day phone torch) component, to be added to all future performances.
Two guarantees of GLA include “Mothertongue” being the noticeable and intensely raw track that could easily go unnoticed but shouldn’t.
With nothing but short on/off muted notes ringing from a scratchy guitar and Sam Mctrusty pushing his vocals to their absolute limits, it really invokes a simple response of either liking or disliking it.
There was also no denying that “No Sleep”, “Overthinking” and “The Chaser” would be the most popular tracks of GLA due to close music relation with their wildly popular back-catalogue, being carefully sculpted for air time and just generally being fantastic songs.