For the first time in 19 months, it is again time to introduce you, kind readers, to my total bald-faced ignorance of a band that should have been right up my alley (please do not substitute other nouns). Although truth be told, if ignorance deterred opinion, the subject of this review might not need to exist.
Teenage Fanclub formed in 1989 and without C14 dating myself, they are a contemporary band that I confess to be a bit ashamed to have lived without. But from the opening cord of “Home” onward, Teenage Fanclub’s latest album, Endless Arcade, proved a brightly-lit collection that seems to radiate into a dimly-aware black-hole of a world spinning out of self-control. To counteract its miraculous escape from under the hellhole of an inertia from 2020, Teenage Fanclub seemed to wear a beaming veneer with just a bit more shine than they might have previously. It is then ironically and self-referentially circular to hear their lyrics still ruminate the cuds of personal conflicts, nostalgia, self-doubt, and falling apart, not the least by including a chipper number called “Everything is Falling Apart” with four-part harmony.
I cannot explain whatever reasons might have justified my expecting otherwise, really. Billy Connolly famously quipped about the ironic mystery of how he became a comedian with “We are a miserable lot. When the Sun comes out, we’d offer to pay for it”. Commiserations, then. Now the whole world knows intimately what it’s like to be tucked indoors because it’s shit both outside and in, while the only stability one has is between the ears, and even that wavers between alcohol and valium.
In an era when some view the scavenging and rhyming of “bottles”, “models”, and “poison arrows” from the OED before it is translated into BTS-ese as the pinnacle of their achievements, it is truly the mark of a purposefully universal dreamscape when the only definitive, non-transposable nouns used in an album appears to be Dionysus, and “in a deadly decline” at that. Is that a long enough sentence to draw the ire of our resident grammarian? I don’t know. While the whole album can be taken as one continuous entity, singling out “The Sun Won’t Shine”, “In Our Dreams”, “Back in the Day”, and “I’m More Inclined” is a simple task, but that’s just because of my melodic preferences.
Had this album not been waved in front of my face in a Zoom chat one Friday night, prompting a search for “pink green record”, I might have lived the rest of my life without being a Teenage fanboy. I don’t know how this highly appreciated happy accident put the universe on the track it is now. But just drop the needle somewhere and while you recline, Dionysus will show the way.