Sasquatch! Music Festival 2016, Day 3: The Twilight Sad

"Scottish people and the sun don't go well together," remarked The Twilight Sad frontman James Graham as he and his black-clad bandmates took a sunlight- and wind-drenched stage. However, perhaps the dissonance between the Scots and Vitamin D fueled Graham and his comrades because, despite the circumstances, the Glasgow quintet delivered a cathartic hour of noisy fury. Their latest LP, 2014's Nobody Wants to Be Here, Nobody Wants To Leave, is their most direct and least distorted album to date, but that didn't seem to factor into their Sasquatch set, which was defined by Andy Macfarlane's grinding guitar and drummer Mark Devine's abuse of his crash cymbal and snare. Even if angsty songs like "Last January", "Reflection of the Television", and "I Became A Prostitute" sound like they were written to be shouted in a cold Scottish basement, their scale worked unexpectedly well on a large stage. The key to this, however, was Graham's commanding, enrapturing presence, shouting and yelling off the microphone in between vocal parts for the full duration of the set before calmly thanking the crowd and walking off, as if he didn't just purge a few more of his ghosts in the midday sun.