It sometimes feels like six weeks is a long time in music at the moment – enough for a scene to begin somewhere, throw up some stuff on Soundcloud and then be dissed for selling out – but six years? Whoa. That’s a crack into which a whole career can fall down.
Not that the collective members of Teenage Fanclub appear to care, nor should they. More than half a decade on from their ninth album ‘Shadows‘, the game may have changed but their song remains the same, one written by a collective of staunchly traditional master craftsmen who make a virtue of almost completely ignoring the fickleness of modernity.
If the protraction sounds like they’re on a sloth-like schedule, there is some mitigation – they’ve been trying. The ground work for ‘Here‘ was laid down more than three years ago whilst as the momentum shifted (comparatively) its main body was recorded in Provence at a suitably retro but well appointed studio equipped with a mixing desk purportedly once used by The Rolling Stones. Add in time for getting it right and a little label shenanigans, and for the band it’s a case of ‘hey, where did it all go?’.
Given that they’re both ancient and modern, ‘Here’ has an appropriate degree of symmetry, with all three writers – Norman Blake, Raymond McGinley and Gerard Love – getting four songs each. To some extent there is a degree of inter-changeability in their respective contributions, but that inherently is no bad thing; opener ‘I’m In Love‘ is so full of TFC trademarks (gilded harmonies, sweet spot guitars just the right side of twee, simple me and you baby dynamics) it doesn’t really matter who gets the credit, just that it simply is.
Those who’ve followed the group – many since their gloriously scuzzy breakthrough album ‘Bandwagonesque‘ in 1991 – will be comfortably glad with the formula employed, at least at the outset. Like the process of its creation, for a time ‘Here’ meanders gently; ‘Thin Air’, ‘Hold On‘ and ‘Darkest Part Of The Night‘ not pushing many envelopes, each as charming, mellifluous and cadenced as the other.
With this constancy established, it’s time for Blake and co. to steer the boat out to slightly deeper waters. Whilst none of their unofficial precepts are broken, the romanticism at least becomes more starkly depicted on ‘I Was Beautiful When I Was Alive‘, a laconic ballad which the singer has described as “Kraut-rock-folk”, it’s grain rougher and less nuanced than long-time listeners might expect. The often tender, occasionally bordering on timid, meter is equally flexed on the brittle psychedelia of ‘Steady State‘ and ‘With You‘s pithy fatalism, whilst on closer ‘Connected To Life‘ it’s ambiguous as to whether the subject’s link should be metaphorical or literal, the centrepiece a maudlin acoustic guitar pirouetting around itself solemnly.
Could any of these digressions be classed as fixing the unbreakable? Possibly, but it’s a considered charge, one offset by a counter hugging phraseology employed with undersold panache: ‘The First Sight‘ echoes the jazzy sketches sometimes spun up by friends and worthy Glaswegian alumni Belle & Sebastian, but it’s perhaps the hedonistic sentiment of ‘Live In The Moment‘ that cuts through most, the words an acknowledgement that the itinerant existence of musicians in a cult-but-niche environment is one which has to be accepted gracefully.
‘Here’ is a record that will change few perceptions, relying often on the instincts of Teenage Fanclub’s rich heritage – but one which also contains a steel underneath its mellow exterior.
It’s equally the sound of them in robustly business as usual form, a trade which they’ve been plying for almost three decades and one which they clearly still treat as a labour of love.
