Later...When the TV Turns to Static

Talking about the songs on the album, James Allan said in an interview with The Quietus, "...the songs were about my experiences... and if they weren't about my experiences, they were about my thoughts on things."[5] Allan explained in another interview with The Daily Record that the song "If" is "quite a sympathetic song. It seems a shame the hardest, toughest things seem to define people. It's not the times you hold the medal or wins that do it. The song is a spiritual view on things – without something evil, the kind-hearted man would walk on by, invisible."[6] He went on to explain the inspiration behind the song: "My idea for the song came about during a phone call a while back with my good friend Alan McGee. He was talking to me about something quite difficult that was going on at the time and I said to him, 'Alan, if we didn't go through the bad stuff, we wouldn't recognize the good stuff; it would be invisible to you."[7] Talking about the album's closing track "Finished Sympathy", Allan told The Guardian that "it's about the speed with which we're expected to shed naivety, how people's expectations can be overwhelming. It's like when an infant trips and falls – people rush to pick them up and crowd around them going, 'Are you OK? Are you all right?' But as soon as you're out of that infant stage, when you trip and fall, everybody laughs at you. As you get older, it seems like sympathy is nowhere to be found."[8] Explaining the meaning behind the title track, Allan said, "I guess it's a song that I was writing, kind of about the place between what has just happened, a chapter that has just passed, and moving into the next chapter, the new dawn, that in-between place, where the unknown lies ahead, the mystery lies ahead, and that can be quite scary."[9]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	61/100[10]
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[11]
Clash	[12]
Drowned in Sound	(5/10)[13]
musicOMH	[14]
NME	(6/10)[15]
The Scotsman	[16]
The Skinny	[17]
The Independent	[18]
PopMatters	(5/10)[19]

Later...When the TV Turns to Static received generally favourable reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 61 based on 11 reviews.[10] Fiona Shepard at The Scotsman praised Allan's songwriting and singled out the songs "Choices" and "I'd Rather Be Dead (Than Be with You)" as "most impressive".[16] Paul Mardles at The Observer also praised "Choices" and the title track as highlights.[20]

Later...When the TV Turns to Static charted at number 41 on the UK Album Charts on 8 September 2013, selling less than 3,000 copies during its first week of release. This marked a decline in fortunes for the band, whose first two albums charted in the top 10. It had sold only 6,248 copies in the UK as of July 2014.[21] The album debuted at number 30 on the Swedish Album Charts.