Teenage Fanclub: "Songs From Northern Britain" (Creation)
The Fannies' music might have a reassuringly familiar jangle, but the Glasgow four-piece can still be infuriatingly inconsistent, going from soaring pop brilliance to pedestrian plodding in the space of a chord change.
Bandwagonesque, their first proper album, was a strong calling card, but the follow-up, Thirteen, was cursed by an absence of real magic. Grand Prix put them back in the running with tunes like Neil Jung and Sparky's Dream, and stands as their best album to date; but though Songs From Northern Britain won't outpace its predecessor, it's still a damn fine contender.
Teenage Fanclub are not out for world domination, but Songs From Northern
Britain will keep them high on the cult list. The three songwriters, Norman
Blake, Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley, now seem to be more in tune with each other's style, making songs like Start Again, I Can't Feel My Soul and Planets sound more like team efforts. Among the 12 compositions are some genuinely heavenly tunes like Jack Uzi (aka I Don't Want Control Of You), Take The Long
Way Round and the recent single, Ain't That Enough, but there's also the odd clunker like It's A Bad World, a cliche-ridden rehash of a previous TFC tune,
About You. Otherwise, the album steers a pastoral path down tracks like
Grumbleweed and Mount Everest, never trying too hard to overstep its self-
imposed boundaries. For the cover artwork the band took a trip around Scotland, taking pictures of such landmarks as Torness nuclear power station; for the music, they took the American route travelled by the likes of Roger McGuinn and
Alex Chilton.
