Teenage Fanclub are still recognisable in the darkness of their new album.
When you’ve been around as an artist for some time – maybe a decade, maybe more – one thing becomes more inevitable as the years pass: that of the writing and delivery of the ‘DARK ALBUM’.
These can vary in subject matter and the degree to which you externalise/internalise stuff, but eventually musicians will wind up in a place somewhere like Bob Mould’s Black Sheets Of Rain, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree or the epitome of dark, the Manic Street Preachers’ Holy Bible.
For a band like Teenage Fanclub that have always had such an assured relationship with melody, the idea of delivering a record filled with such existential dread seemed anathema and yet, in recent years, even their output has worn the marks of life’s tribulations, with founding member Gerard Love departing before the release of 2021’s Endless Arcade, itself an album which featured material penned by Norman Blake in the aftermath of his marriage breakdown.
Nothing Lasts Forever seems by title to subscribe to the reverse philosophy of its predecessor, but even with the days of being locked inside for months on end gone experience offers wisdom, and the pragmatist’s choice is simply to accept what will happen will happen.
Blake summed up the group’s mindset when going into recording with: “You’re getting older, you’re going into the cupboard getting the black suit out more often. Thoughts of mortality and the idea of the light must have been playing on our minds a lot.”
That sense of impermanency is the thought in mind with the opening track Foreign Land, which starts with a restrained bought of feedback before slipping into their patented gentle, grown-up rock, as Blake sagely imparts: “The past’s a foreign land/I did my best you understand,” all the while seeking nobody’s forgiveness.
Keen observers will note that despite the relative economy – the ten songs come in at under forty minutes – three of the song titles feature the word light. Whilst they might also reasonably assume that I Left a Light On, See The Light and Back To The Light are somehow connected, the suggestion has been dismissed by co-lead creator Raymond McGinley.
However they’re unrelated, the finest of this non-triptych is See The Light; with thoughtful keyboards provided by former Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci member Euros Childs, the players seem almost animated whilst still never slipping their moorings. Tired Of Being Alone, by contrast, uses the same tools to deliver a maudlin, autumnal sounding sense of pathos.
The biggest mistake many who’ve dipped in and out of the band’s story however is to take them simply at face value. Hostages with fate, here the piano led Self Sedation quotes Blake’s namesake, the apocryphal poet William’s Auguries Of Innocence: “Some are born to endless night’/I’d say my namesake got that right.”
It’s the seven-minute closer I Will Love You however that brings more unexpected grit to the oyster. The trick isn’t in its twinkling, deceptively simple cadence but in its subject being willing to love and have it outlast hate, to a time not yet on the horizon when, ‘The bigots are gone/after they apologise/for all the harm that they’ve done’. Uplifting and here for any takers, it’s a beautifully worthwhile sonic conclusion.
Darkness has caught up with them yes, but the quintet’s adherence to their sonic principles illuminates their personal and professional durability; these are not men spinning out towards a pipe and slippers any time soon.
Nothing Lasts Forever sees Teenage Fanclub affirmatively doing the journey their way, not ready to become something in the past tense just yet.
