Teenage Fanclub
9:30 Club, Washington DC, April 27, 2024
More than 33 years after their defining album
Bandwagonesque famously beat out
Nevermind as record of the year in SPIN, Teenage Fanclub’s well-established formula remains intact: immensely tuneful, sweetly sung, guitar pop that has moved toward classic chords and compositional structure, and farther from the blare and dissonance of their early records.
I’ve seen Teenage Fanclub three times in the past ten years. After the departure of Gerry Love, the role of songwriter Norman Blake has become more central. He’s always been the band’s nominal frontman, as the most talkative member, and now he and Raymond McGinley are the sole writers and singers following Love’s retirement. This show at the 9:30 Club was their first in Washington since the pandemic, and was a weird, oddly early start time: doors at 6:30 for a headlining act starting before 7:30 for the temporarily-ill-named 9:30 Club. It was perhaps befitting of a band and an audience whose teenage years are far in the rearview mirror, but I didn’t complain, and neither did the band.
The band was touring in support of their two post-pandemic records,
Endless Arcade in 2021 and
Nothing Lasts Forever from 2023, both released on Merge, which has been their American label for a long time. I have both of these albums — it’s very cheap to buy CDs in the 2020s, fyi, if you feel your only options are free streaming and expensive vinyl! — and they’re fine if predictable. The band has leaned into classic song structure, yearning harmonies, and chiming guitar chords. There are at least three classically tuneful Teenage Fanclub compositions in the concise 39 minute running time of the newest album, and that’s pretty much par for their batting average in the recent years.
At the 9:30 Club, after an entirely mild and forgettable show by
Sweet Baboo, the Teenage Fans took the stage at a very sedate hour with a spotlight on the two most recent records, leading in with McGinley’s “Tired of Being Alone” from
Nothing Lasts Forever. They did five tracks from that record, and three from
Endless Arcade. Nothing Lasts Forever, despite the elegiac title, is mostly about seeking contentment and comfort; weirdly three of the songs in the brief record feature the word “light” in the title. “See the Light” and “I Left the Light On” are two of the featured tracks in concert; they exemplify the current iteration of the Blake-led, Love-less (but not loveless) Teenage Fanclub. Blake’s become a pure pop classicist wedded to elegant chord changes, sturdy bridges, and harmonies that capably blend his handsomely ragged lead vocal with McGinley’s reedy voice.
“I Left the Light On” is all piano triplets and understated rhythm sections. On the record, swelling strings flesh out its simple bones, and it’s a song that would have been a 70s AM radio chestnut if it had been recorded at that time. You can really hear on a song like this why Blake and Joe Pernice of the Pernice Brothers became such simpatico collaborators, given their mutual fondness for classic songwriting structures (and beer, bicycle touring, European soccer, and Canadian wives).
McGinley is not an extrovert like Blake, and his singing in concert has become a bit more uneven, but some of his songs are among Teenage Fanclub’s best, none better than the simply stated anthem, “Your Love is the Place Where I Come From,” from
Songs From Northern Britain. No less a writer than Nick Hornby has called it
one of his favorite songs of all time. It’s a track that might slide past you at first, since it lacks the brash energy of some of the tracks from
Bandwagonesque and
Thirteen, but its grace is undeniable. Transpose it to harpsichord and strings, and you can imagine this playing a ballroom scene in
Bridgerton.
After the opening set featuring mostly new material, the band segued toward their classic material, which was presented with simplicity and style, but perhaps not the chaotic energy they would have had in the 1990s.
Bandwagonesque got five tracks, including the set-closer, “The Concept,” one of the finest power-pop/psychedelic rock songs of its era, and the yearning “What You Do to Me.” The weak point with Teenage Fanclub is always going to be the lyrics; no matter who wrote the words, the band tends to find a simple emotional state (vulnerability, affection, celebration, fear of loss) and state it plainly, but Blake’s “What You Do to Me” benefits from the simplicity of the exuberance of a new romantic attraction. The song is not even two minutes long and has only a single chorus and a single verse; really do you need anything more when you have chords that crash and harmonies that soar like that?
In the four-song encore, the band wrapped up, as they always do, with “Everything Flows,” their debut single from the record
A Catholic Education. It’s a shoegaze classic, and it’s not one of my favorite Fanclub songs, but it shows that even as young men, barely teens as their name suggested, the band had a stoic, philosophical bent:
You get older every year
But you don't change
Or I don't notice you're changing
I think about it every day
But only for a little while
At this point Teenage Fanclub are well into their solid middle years, maybe senior citizens even. With the exception of the departure of Love in 2018, the band’s stability and longevity have been admirable. They are mostly musical comfort food at this point, but I am still glad to have them.
Setlist:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/teenage-fanclub/2024/930-club-washington-dc-53a82bb5.html
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/22/2024 11:48AM by zwirnm.
