The news that Teenage Fanclub would release its first record in five years came as a welcome surprise. I had assumed that Scotland’s finest working pop band had thrown in the towel, and when the news rolled out that Tortoise’s John McEntire would be producing, this became easily one of my most anticipated releases of the year.
The new release Man-Made finds the Fanclub in a pensive mood. While both Songs From Northern Britain and Howdy! saw the band mix pop euphoria with a decidedly melancholic streak, Man-Made tends more toward subtlety than the release of some of their earlier records. Each of the songs have deceptively dense structures & productions that don’t initially bring the songcraft to the fore. Repeated listenings, though, bring out delicate touches – a harmony that zags when it should zig, hidden layers of strings and reverb, and indeed the same great songs and pop sense that the band has effortlessly brought to its music throughout its career. This is surely an album that I will return to many times in the next few years.
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This weekend found me spending three straight days at my 20th high school reunion — a “pub crawl” on Friday, a dance party on Saturday and a family picnic on Sunday. It was pretty amazing – a word I don’t use lightly – to be among all those folks again, still so much themselves, but more self-assuredly so. At first it was almost embarrassing to make eye contact with people; how did they get so old? Surely that’s not true of me, too? Or was it that I was younger then than we thought we were? All those tired eyes, shifting hairlines,… offspring and lifemates! After the initial shock, everybody got along and had fun. So far nobody has confessed to melancholy, but then that’s not something you would send out in a mail to 120+ people, most of whom are strangers. No, that’s something you reserve for your blog.
Here’s a note about the picnic from my old friend Chris, who I’ve known since first grade but hadn’t spoken to in 20 years:
It was hilarious to see kids at the picnic and know instantly who their BHS mom or dad was. DNA is an amazing thing. Also fun to hear the kids trying to figure out together if their parents were friends.
Chris introduced himself Saturday by apologizing for whatever he’d done to me. Funny thing is, I remember doing more to him than he did to me. Refractionary tricks of the mind. Probably neither of had ever “done anything” to each other.
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It’s a myth that your body’s cells are completely replaced every seven years; some cells can live up to 120 years. So that means that I haven’t been three different people since high school, which might have been fun to imagine and feels like its close to the truth. But, alas, as I learned over the weekend, we are all ourselves just so much more so.
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Teenage Fanclub has a new song out about the inevitability of aging. “[It's] written about coming to terms with your place in the world, about dealing with ageing,” Norman Blake says. “When you’re almost 40 years old and you’re still in a pop band, you can sometimes have doubts.”
[Soundtrack]
Teenage Fanclub – Cells.mp3