Forget the Night Ahead is a streamlining of The Twilight Sad’s debut, 2007’s Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters. The same migraine guitars dominate the album, droning noise fills every gap and James Graham continues to make his bad-teenage-poetry lyrics resonate through this thickly accented delivery and sheer tenacious determination. What’s changed this time around is that all of these elements are packaged in a more easily digested way.

Largely ditching its atmospheric leanings for more direct rockers, the band possesses a crunch here that it didn’t on its debut. It’s strange, then, that Forget the Night Ahead doesn’t pack as powerful a punch as Fourteen Autumns. The whole point of the album seems to be coaxing the strongest impact possible out of The Twilight Sad’s Mogwai-with-bleeding-heart-vocals sound, but it doesn’t leave a mark. Those unfamiliar with the dark, noisy world of The Twilight Sad will find a lot to like on Forget the Night Ahead, but the converted will likely find that the distillation process robbed the band’s sound of its purity.