That Summer, At Home I Had Become The Best Band Of My Generation: The Twilight Sad, ABC, 02/04/10

Something about tonight feels epochal.

The Twilight Sad has firmly established itself as the greatest Scottish band of its time, the best to emerge since the late '90s boom that produced Belle and Sebastian and Chemikal Underground's early roster: Mogwai, The Delgados, Arab Strap. If its 2009 sophomore album, Forget The Night Ahead, doesn't quite match its 2007 debut, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, it's only because the latter is arguably the finest album of the past decade, Scottish, debut or otherwise, and to say that it remains the band's finest hour is to say that Radiohead has never really topped Kid A, or that Sonic Youth has never really topped Daydream Nation. The band is the figurehead of a revitalised Scottish indie scene, many of whom are present at tonight's gig, most notably label-mates and frequent tour-mates Frightened Rabbit and We Were Promised Jetpacks, and tonight, it's playing to a bigger audience than it ever has before.

It's played on the ABC stage previously, mind: opening for (and, in the process, rendering irrelevant) Camera Obscura, playing as part of the Music Like A Vitamin benefit shows alongside Sons And Daughters and Norman Blake. But this is The Twilight Sad's first time as headliners, the culmination of three years of slow build: of word of mouth spreading; of elevation from well-regarded debutants to a band capable of selling out King Tut's twice in the space of a year; of eventually reaching the point where the notion of playing a hometown Christmas show in 2009 in somewhere as low capacity as Nice'n'Sleazy's becomes so ludicrous that all the tickets are gone before most fans even realise they've gone on sale.

Good as the Sleazy's show was, it aptly demonstrated the problem facing the band at this juncture: its sound has become too huge to be contained by such an intimate venue. Whilst The Twilight Sad will never fill stadiums, and indeed, most of its recorded output seems designed more for solitary listening on headphones than mass catharsis, live, its songs demand space to breathe, to rattle around in, to fill. Space that can't be provided by venues more used to putting on four bands a night whose parents help them on and off the stage.

It's this combination of the epic and the intimate, the grandstanding and the painfully shy, that makes The Twilight Sad such a fascinating prospect. When Frightened Rabbit filled the ABC to capacity the week after The Twilight Sad's Sleazy's show, it was surprising without being entirely unexpected: for all the excruciatingly personal lyrics of The Midnight Organ Fight, there has always been an accessibility to its sound, one solidified by the recently released The Winter Of Mixed Drinks and its unfortunate sonic resemblance to Snow Patrol. In other words, it's a band that could conceivably go on to fill stadiums, and probably will, depending on how well its slot opening for said Northern Irish beige monsters at Bellahouston Park goes this summer.

The Twilight Sad, however, can prove more confounding: obtuse where Frightened Rabbit is direct, with no leavening humour and squalls of white noise balancing out the anthemic choruses, if they can even be called choruses. That's why it's so encouraging to discover that, if not quite a sell-out, tonight's gig is closer to it than anyone, the band included, had any right to expect: without watering down its sound or making things easier for the listener, The Twilight Sad has somehow managed to connect to an audience on a far greater scale than was previously imaginable.

In a hilariously grandiloquent gesture worthy of U2, tonight's big gimmick is the addition of a second PA system at the back of the hall, providing a quadraphonic surround sound experience. The band - minus recently departed bassist Craig Orzel, the first line-up shuffle since its inception - comes on-stage to the instrumental latter portion of Forget The Night Ahead's "Floorboards Under The Bed", a minor blessing given that the album version contains the worst lyrics it's yet recorded (specifically 'we've taken all of our mistakes/and we've turned them into an aeroplane') and is now guaranteed not to resurface later in the set. It's here that the extra speakers are used most ostentatiously, snatches of piano and electronic noise whooshed around each outpost in turn to demonstrate the system's full capabilities, before the band snaps into "Reflection Of The Television" and the combination of all-consuming noise and eye-melting light-show makes clear that the purpose of the audio set-up isn't simple point-and-gawp 'ooh, that sounds like it's coming from over there!' but full body immersion in the music.

There's no escaping it, and it makes perfect sense: if The Twilight Sad is the kind of band that sounds best on headphones, then this is the nearest live equivalent to that feeling of being enveloped in sound, of bridging the gap between the raw intimacy of James Graham's lyrics and the epic aspirations of Andy MacFarlane's melodic manipulated noise. The Sleazy's gig might have had proximity to the band on its side, but the ABC has the advantage when it comes to the volume necessary to do these tremendous songs justice, to fully convey both their heart-stopping beauty and their hearing-stopping ferocity.

The setlist is exceptionally close, if not identical, to the Sleazy's set: unsurprisingly focused on Forget The Night Ahead, but with room for about half of Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters too. Something about it just works so much better here, though. Current single and album high-point "The Room" is particularly suited to this kind of environment, riding a similar single, insistent piano note to Fourteen Autumns' immaculate opener "Cold Days From The Birdhouse", Graham starting out quiet, fragile, before escalating in intensity with the music to a howl of emotion, the kind of song that could be considered anthemic were it not so clearly wrenching. His lyrics are no more explicit than they have to be, but even at their most inscrutable his impassioned delivery conveys their full meaning.

By the end of the set, and the now traditional closing trio of "And She Would Darken The Memory", "I'm Taking The Train Home" and "Cold Days From The Birdhouse", he seems quite overcome, visibly humbled by both the size of the crowd and their overwhelming reaction. He murmurs sincere thanks before "Cold Days" begins and ends the set, saying that this is probably going to be the last time they'll play it like this. Whether that means it's due to be reworked by a restless band constantly pushing forward or - horrors - dropped from rotation entirely for a while is unclear, but it gives the crowd license to belt it out as if they've just been told they'll never hear it in any form ever again. It's glorious, and then it's gone, and the band with it. As usual, no encores.

If "Cold Days" is in fact being dropped from live shows, then it couldn't have had a more fitting send-off. Something about tonight makes it feel like the conclusion of the first stage of The Twilight Sad, the kind of high point that'll be looked upon as a benchmark in years to come: a sterling example of a band seeing its full potential and grabbing it with both hands. The kind of show that'll come to be spoken of in reverently hushed tones, that people will lie about having attended. The famous epigram about The Velvet Underground is that it was the kind of band barely anyone heard at the time, but everyone who did was so inspired that they went off to form their own equally important bands. The Twilight Sad, thrillingly, feels like it's become that kind of band. Only now, people are starting to listen.