A cursory search online yields any number of videos with singer James Graham and guitarist Andy MacFarlane from the Twilight Sad playing unplugged at record stores, radio stations and local parks. These informal sets are spellbinding, as you witness Graham not just wearing his heart on his sleeve, but tearing it from his chest and nailing it there.
And so it goes with Òran Mór Session, where the band takes songs from 2014’s Nobody Wants To Be Here And Nobody Wants To Leave and strips them down to their barest essence, hearing Graham’s impassioned performance enhanced only by MacFarlane’s skeletal guitar and the reverb from a converted Glaswegian church. Whereas Nobody was a somewhat muddled amalgam of the band’s trademark guitar noise and more recent electronic explorations, the stark, live rendering at Òran Mór reveals the quiet beauty and strength these songs possessed all along.
—Matt Ryan
