Teenage Fanclub

Teenage Fanclub

Nothing Lasts Forever

Merge

***“Foreign Land” is the opening track on Teenage Fanclub’s 2023 studio album, Nothing Lasts Forever. That track—and the rest of this beautifully rich and melodic album—is the sound of a season’s end, of the last warm days of the year while nights begin to draw in and thoughts become reflective and more than a little melancholy. While the vocals and the finishing touches on Nothing Lasts Forever were recorded at Raymond McGinley’s place in Glasgow, the music was recorded in an intense 10-day period in the bucolic Welsh countryside at Rockfield Studios, near Monmouth, in August 2022. You can hear the effect of that environment on the record—it’s full of soft breeze, wide skies, beauty, and space. Though the band that recorded Nothing Lasts Forever—McGinley and Norman Blake on lead vocals and guitar, along with Francis Macdonald on drums, Dave McGowan on bass, and Euros Childs on keyboards—arrived at the residential studio without a fixed plan, their confidence and ease with working together meant the record came together incredibly quickly.

Teenage Fanclub

Endless Arcade

Merge

***Even if we weren’t living through extraordinarily troubling times, there is nothing quite like a Teenage Fanclub album to assuage the mind, body, and soul, and to reaffirm that all is not lost in this world. Endless Arcade follows the band’s ninth album Here, released in 2016 to universal acclaim and notably their first UK Top 10 album since 1997, a mark of how much they’re treasured. The new record is quintessential TFC: melodies are equal parts heartwarming and heartaching, guitars chime and distort, keyboard lines mesh and spiral, harmony-coated choruses burst out like sun on a stormy day. In the 1990s, the band crafted a magnetically heavy yet harmony-rich sound on classic albums such as Bandwagonesque and Grand Prix. This century, albums such as Shadows and Here have documented a more relaxed, less “teenage” Fanclub, reflecting the band’s stage in life and state of mind, alongside which Endless Arcade slots perfectly. The album walks a beautifully poised line between melancholic and uplifting, infused with simple truths. The importance of home, community, and hope is entwined with more bittersweet, sometimes darker thoughts of insecurity, anxiety, and loss.

Teenage Fanclub

Here

Merge

***The wait is over! TEENAGE FANCLUB have returned with Here, the band’s first album in six years. As ever, song-wise the Fanclub present a textbook representation of democracy in action, the record offering four each by NORMAN BLACKE, GERARD LOVE and RAYMOND MCGINLEY. From the almighty chime of opener “I’m In Love” through the ecstatic soul-search of “The First Sight” and the paean to unerring friendship “With You,” Here is a collection of twelve songs about the only things that truly matter: life and love. As is befitting of a record that took its time to arrive, Here uses reflective space to dazzling effect. “Steady State,” with its gorgeous ebb and flow, has echoes of The Notorious Byrd Brothers’ astral jangle, while “I Was Beautiful When I Was Alive” unexpectedly curves off from dreamlike beginnings into a semi-acoustic/motorik outro, sonically replacing the steady beat of the German autobahn with the vast open skies of the Pacific Coast Highway. Not for one second is Here the sound of procrastination or headscratching. It’s the effortless work of a band entirely confident in their own craft—the consolidation of nearly three decades of peerless songwriting and almost telepathic musicianship. Here is a record that embraces maturity and experience and hugs them close.

Teenage Fanclub

Man Made

Merge

***TEENAGE FANCLUB’s Man-Made is the second August installment in the Merge Records 25th anniversary reissue series. Originally released in 2005, Man-Made is a classic Fanclub record in tone and arrangement, and handsomely demonstrates the “less is more” maxim--it is both airier and more light of touch than it’s immediate predecessors. Teenage Fanclub made the record in Chicago with JOHN MCENTIRE (Tortoise) at his Soma Electronic Music Studios. Though McEntire’s production is subtle, his unique aesthetics are definitely apparent on Man-Made as odd keyboards and sundry other inevitably electronic apparatuses bubble and bleep just below the surface of fuzzed-out guitars, chugging basslines, and layered vocals.

Teenage Fanclub

Shadows

Merge

***It has been five long years since TEENAGE FANCLUB’s last album Man-Made was released to universal acclaim, so it is no overstatement to say the new album is keenly anticipated. While most bands are lucky to have one great songwriter, Teenage Fanclub are blessed with three, hence Shadows is overflowing with the kind of gorgeous, harmony-driven classics you’d expect to find on a greatest hits album. No Export to Canada. (STREET DATE - 6/08/20/10)