Teenage Fanclub

Grunge turns twanglesome over an often glorious-dream rock decade.

Scotland’s Big Star, Teenage Fanclub started life as full-on grunge-noise rockers, and spent the 90s gradually going folk. Along the way they released some of the greatest albums of the era, all remastered for these heavyweight vinyl reissues. Heavyweight, presumably, to keep their euphoric, angel-light multi-part harmonies lifting straight off the turntable. “We’re like The Beatles – we’ve got four singers and one of us is shit,” Norman Blake once quipped; in fact, during their imperial 90s period, they were more Beatlelike for their superhuman melodic clout.

1991’s Bandwagonesque (9/10) acted as a kind of bridging masterpiece between the galactic fuzz of shoegaze and sophisticated glam, and earned them a billion Alex Chilton comparisons thanks to such bliss-rock stompers as What You Do To

Me, Metal Baby and Acoholiday. I Don’t Know, the long-lost missing link between baggy and Oasis, is here too, while the sumptuous December and pop-thrash Star Sign marked out Teenage Fanclub as 90s indie rock’s premier hook crafters.

Thirteen (1993, 7/10) is considered their earlyperiod off day, but even in this pleasantly patchy, often lacklustre collection (overstretched choruses, ballads resembling grunge shrugs) there’s sporadic magic, in the slide guitar hooks of The Cabbage, the adorable Tears Are Cool or the surf-pop Radio. Accompanied by a seven-inch of the sole unreleased track of the reissue, straight-outa-Nashville slowie Country Song, there’s a tangible softening of edge here, which dulled Thirteen but proved perfectly suited to the stream of superlative gleam-rock bangers that constituted 1995’s nearperfect Grand Prix (9/10). Utterly re-energised and embracing Byrdsian folk and Britpop nuances, the likes of About You, Sparky’s Dream and Don’t Look Back comprised a rare torrent of effortless melodic euphoria.

Songs From Northern Britain (1997, 8/10) tipped the scale further folkwards, bookending a collection of artful, mid-paced ballads with arguably the best indie rock anthems of their career in Start Again and Speed Of Light.

By 2000’s understated Howdy! (5/10), though, The Byrds had fully taken roost and TFC’s melodic fire was sputtering. There were uplifting moments, but they’d become a psych folk band shortly destined even to ditch the psych. This was a decade-long saunter from slime to slipper, but my, did it take in some majestic sights.