The thing about institutions is that they’re meant to be impenetrable.
We wouldn’t after all want to pursue an adulatory relationship with something or someone that had to explain themselves or come round and do the washing up. That’s not how it works.
Take Teenage Fanclub; a Scottish musical institution by anyone’s standards having broken through in 1991 with the near legendary album Bandwagonesque, their career path since has been one that’s gone precisely as they intended, no matter how contrary things have seemed to outsiders.
This has made for some arcane decisions; take for instance Gerard Love’s exit from the band in 2018, the reasons for which depend on who you ask. Whatever the truth, Love was replaced with Dave McGowan, who was also joined by Euros Child of Gorky’s Zygotic Monkey on keyboards, the latter quipping that as a result he’d been forced to learn where the chords were on his instrument.
Is this news? They’ve not exactly been The Fall, but in the past every so often other players have left the TFC mothership. Love was of one of the band’s core songwriters, but as a surprise to almost no-one, Endless Arcade doesn’t sound markedly different to its predecessor, 2016’s Here.
In doing so familiar principles are maintained, such as an unrepentant wearing of influences fans know and love (Byrds, Big Star, Velvets) and melody remaining king in a world where discord has been the standard for many in recent years.
That the quintet’s two remaining scribes, Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley, are old sparring partners has probably helped quell any doubts about any (relatively) new directions of travel.
Signs were encouraging: their tenth studio album was preceded by Everything’s Falling Apart, a tune penned by the latter, both tentative and more fuzzed up than for many years, the words tellingly about being robust when faced with life’s up and downs.
Little did we know then that everyone was going to have plenty of those moments in the months afterwards. With the main body of the album crafted in pre-pandemic Hamburg, Blake & McGinley were subsequently forced to bubble up to complete it with the rest of the group absent.
It’s easy to forget amongst all the meta level angst that people still exist. Working as a reminder, in a rarely candid act, Blake, normally the band’s avuncular most public face, has this time written half-a-dozen songs which deal with the end of a relationship.
Processing your feelings as you get older can become easier with perspective; there are fewer howls or troughs of despair, only such as on opener Home, a reconciliation with the past (‘Endless lonely hours/Saw you drift away/And I’ve been waiting for the sun to shine/But the sky is grey’).
Blake’s ruminations are backed with the sort of effortless vintage arrangements which he and Teenage Fanclub have become synonymous with, Childs also playing an unassuming virtuoso role.
Sometimes regret is apparently closer to the surface (Back In The Day) than others (the sweetly waltzing The Sun Won’t Shine On Me), but resolution does seem on the horizon by I’m More Inclined (‘I didn’t find religion/I never needed to/I’m more inclined to put my faith in you).
For his part, McGinley seems happier to be a sounding board and shoulder to lean on, his final word on the album’s title-track one of both resignation but equally hope for the future, despite its complete uncertainty.
That’s the thing with institutions, they shape us in ways we can’t define. And although Endless Arcade offers us a tantalizingly intimate glimpse of the characters behind Teenage Fanclub, on it they keep rolling forward, happy to remain as much of a mystery as we want them to be.