In February 2004, when Teenage Fanclub arrived at John McEntire’s Soma Electronic Music Studios in Ukrainian Village, snow was piled in drifts and the wind was whipping, and singer Norman Blake looked up to see a street sign that said division. The Scottish quartet had never recorded outside the UK, and for a moment he wondered if this were a bad omen for the band.
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Blake formed the band in Glasgow in 1989 with drummer Francis MacDonald and fellow singer-songwriters Gerard Love and Raymond McGinley. By the early 90s they were the pop jewel in the crown of Alan McGee’s Creation Records. Teenage Fanclub rode shotgun with Nirvana on a European tour supporting Nevermind–which finished in second place on Spin’s year-end album list, behind the Fannies’ 1991 classic, Bandwagonesque. In the mid-90s, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, who’s hardly free with a compliment, called them “the second-best band in the world.” But Creation folded in 2000 and the group was shunted to corporate parent Sony, where they languished. After that year’s lukewarm Howdy!, which wasn’t released in the States till late 2001, they fulfilled their contractual obligation with a 2003 best-of. “I would hate to think the group would’ve fizzled out after the compilation record,” says Blake. “That’s not the way we wanted to finish.”
Given the band’s loose, spontaneous approach to music making, it would’ve been difficult for McEntire to overhaul their sound anyway. “We tend to do things quite intuitively–we don’t get too conceptual about it,” says McGinley. “We approach recording naturally: set up the gear, pick up your instrument, and lay it down. With this album there was never any huge discussion of exactly how it should sound. We just kinda did our thing and let John do his thing around us.” But the band did tinker with their time-tested formula, inspired by their new engineer and the change of scenery: the arrangements are tighter and the vocal harmonies simpler, the guitar lines intertwine in a more consistently complementary way, and a couple of the time signatures depart from the usual 4/4. “I don’t think that we’re ever gonna drastically change what we sound like from album to album,” says McGinley. “I don’t think we can, by virtue of the way the group is set up–there are three songwriters, so there’s no one with a single overall vision. But we did try and develop.”
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