Endless Arcade

Album review

Most rock bands don't last 30 years or get to the point of having to contemplate how to age gracefully. Teenage Fanclub, who burst onto the indie rock scene in 1991 with the release of their brilliant sophomore album, Bandwagonesque, have step-by-careful-step found ways of staying in the game, in the process morphing from a noisy, guitar-heavy Glasgow power pop quintet into a folky, soft rock act based around the songwriting, guitars and singing of its two stalwarts Norman Blake and Raymond McGinley. Painstaking craftsmen who only release an album every five years or so, the pair are now surrounded by a band of keyboardist Euros Childs, original drummer Francis Macdonald (who returned in 2000) and guitarist/bassist Dave McGowan, who joined the band in 2004 and now replaces original bassist and singer Gerard Love who left in 2018. While losing Love's institutional memory and third vocal presence is a blow, in their own "get on with it" way, The Fannies, as they are affectionately referred to by fans, have soldiered on with Blake and McGinley building their tenth album, the anxious Endless Arcade.

Instead of Teenage Fanclub's earlier roar and rambunctious lyrics about having seen it all before and girls who are "gonna get some records by the Status Quo," this is now a band whose commitment to Byrdsian chime and writing hooky, power pop-leaning melodies has happily survived. Only now it's couched in strummy, unaffected guitars and polished, impeccably arranged vocal harmonies. Simply recorded, the band's vocal harmonies dominate a detailed, balanced mix. Incessantly worried these days about mortality and convinced that "emotional honesty" is the only "lasting value," Teenage Fanclub now urges listeners not to be afraid of the "endless arcade" of life, while at the same time in Blake's "The Sun Won't Shine on Me," he and McGinely sing "With a troubled mind/ I am in decline." In McKinley's "Come With Me," another bittersweet, slowly unfolding tune, the pair ruminate, "Come with me, together we'll ride to infinity/Come with me, together we'll hide from reality." The dreamy, mostly downcast zeitgeist is dispelled if only for a moment by Blake's "I'm More Inclined," a beautiful evocation of faith in true love. Having traded power for pensive, Teenage Fanclub's wonderous devotion to melody continues to conquer even their gravest apprehensions. © Robert Baird/Qobuz