Every album sleeve tells a story....Number 1

...being a series of photos of combinations of album sleeves, grouped together meaningfully, arbitrarily or some point in between, whose juxtapositions are meant to ape the place where umbrellas, sewing machines and dissecting tables meet, or maybe put a chap in mind of Francis Bacon's triptychs, or Rod Stewart and Shanghai Lil, the sum of the parts being greater and all that.....


Number one - The times they have a-changed

A photo posted by David owen (@mrdave57) on Sep 14, 2016 at 7:14am PDT

TEENAGE FANCLUB HAVE FOUND IT HERE

Just over twenty years ago Teenage Fanclub pre-empted and pooh-poohed any criticism of their moving on from adolescent guitar strangling with an acoustic EP re-contextualising four of their, even then, established minor classics.  Entitled Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It the versions signposted their move from The Status Quo referencing hairy squall of Everything Flows and some of Alcoholiday to the melodic motherlode they accessed via  Big Star and The Byrds and alchemised on Thirteen, Grand Prix and subsequently.  Their career could be seen as a refinement of this moment.  They have continued to lose it in style for over 20 years.

"Here" is a statement of intent and place and time.  Perhaps paradoxically it is also what used to be called a "grower", and though immediately likable it's subtleties are the better for knowing.  Given it's bucolic cover and dwelling on the processes of life and change, maybe it is not so strange that the album grows in stature and weight  These opposites always coexist.  It is often unacknowledged that an artist's tenth album (or even thirty-seventh) can be their best, but these artifacts lack the novelty and (often) jeunesse of the beginning artist.  It would be a shame if the Fanclub's doubtless no-longer-teenaged fan-base consigned this to the shelf after one-point-two listens, as we are wont to do from time to time.  "Here" is full of melodic guitar solos, breezy rhythms, apt yet novel changes and effervescent harmonies, embellishing the twelve songs which, as custom dictates, are split democratically between the three songwriters with only the cognoscenti able to say who wrote what.  Robert Forster recently said he writes at best two songs a year, three if he is on fire.  Teenage Fanclub, ignoring their side project sorties, have had six years to choose and burnish their four songs.  It's a slowburn.

On my last run through the best track is "The First Sight", as Track seven it is also doubtless track one side two.  On a different day it has been the compassionate "The Darkest Part of the Night", at other times "Hold On", wherein cliché and eternal verity are fused.  Track eleven, "With You" makes a convincing case of disproving Robert Forster's adage (What, him again?!) that the penultimate track of side two is always an albums weakest. The song sequencing is either well considered or a happy accident as they buttress and echo each other.  This is a record which resists and is diminished by track skipping and cherry picking.

Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It came out shortly before Oasis' "Be Here Now", an album which is now shorthand for bombast eclipsing perspicacity; it is the point that Oasis lost it, and the vaguely Buddhist title more a plea for the buzz to continue than statement of self-awareness.  "Here" is, however, a considered meditation on time passing, connection and the bittersweet notion of living in the moment (Track eight is "Live in the Moment"), and recognises that despite it's harmonic gorgeousness some of the issues it speaks of resist comfort.  The more you listen, the more you feel the undertow in the guitars, in the resignation.  The musicianship is skilled and deft, not slick and empty, and somehow they have not polished away the sparkle or the grit.  Like Alcoholiday, like Songs From Northern Britain, "Here" is also their best album.

So I dug Teenage Fanclub Have Lost It out of it's place in The Wall Of Sound (CD wing, alongside other examples of that forgotten phenomena of the 1990s, the four track CD single/EP).  It's more than stood the test of time, and in the acoustic slide guitar take of Everything Flows you notice the unity of their preoccupations, the teenager father to the man.  "You get older every year, but you don't change, I don't notice you changing."  Even within the comfortable and familiar you can set a course you don't know.



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