Teenage Fanclub – Deep Fried Fanclub
It has become de rigueur with young up and coming bands to name drop Scottish indie legends Teenage Fanclub, and NME favourites Yuck have gone as far as taking their template and reselling it to the 21st century indie masses. So the timing of this re-issue of their collection of rarities and oddities, Deep Fried Fanclub couldn’t be better timed. Unfortunately, while it’s an interesting collection of the bands odds and sods, highlighting the band’s progression from grunge to indie and beyond, it’s not the best introduction for newcomers.
The album starts well with the timeless brilliance of perhaps their best known song ‘Everything Flows’ and is sustained with some imaginative and innovative cover versions, from their enthusiastic, energetic and entertaining reworking of the Beatle’s ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ to their deep, dark and dangerous cover of Beat Happening’s ‘Bad Seed’. Although the inclusion of a cover of ‘Free Again’ is perhaps ill advised merely adding fuel to the fire of those long forgotten critics who accused them of being little more than Big Star copyists.
Ultimately, Deep Fried Fanclub is let down by the inclusion of too many lacklustre tracks from the bottom of the Fanclub’s barrel. While this is perhaps to be expected from a compilation album of the lesser known tracks from the band’s oeuvre, it doesn’t make it any easier to listen to. The vocal harmonies on second track ‘Primary Education’ for example are closer to the drunken warblings of an out of tune street performer than you’d expect from their later records.
It’s not easy to see why Deep Fried Fanclub has been re-released in 2011. As an historical record of the nether regions of the band’s output it’s ok. As a cash-in on their new found popularity it’s a puzzler. If you’re new to Teenage Fanclub (where have you been?) then it’s not the best introduction, you’d be better checking out Bandwagonesque instead, and long standing fans will surely already have it in their collection.
Rating: 6/10
Purchase and listen
Related Reviews
-
Hot Head Show - The Lemon LP
Listening to Hot Head Show’s debut album, The Lemon LP stimulates time consuming, and ultimately fruitless, experiments to track, catalogue and rationalise the potential influences, or borrowed sounds one might detect across the LP’s reasonably concise thirty four minutes. Primus or Les Claypool (with whom the band has a touring relationship) is perhaps the most obvious, but it is hard to stymie further, ever-more eclectic suggestions. [read more]
-
Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien
New York band Cymbals Eat Guitars sound a bit like Pavement. Had Joseph D'Agostino put as much effort into aping Stephen Malkmus's voice as he done his music Lenses Alien could almost be called a lost Pavement album. It's not really quite as good, but it's pretty hard to ape perfection perfectly so I think we'll let them off the hook. [read more]
-
Jonathan Wilson - Gentle Spirit
“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.” – Hunter S Thompson. This quote sums it up perfectly for me at the moment, and the reason why my recent reviews and online blogging titbits have been laboured on so much of late. I’m losing my sanity. I need something to fight against and battle for, I can’t like everything I’m given can I? [read more]
-
Fungi Girls - Some Easy Magic
Fungi Girls know how to create psychedelic music – that’s a fact. Their previous record, Seafaring Pyramids, was a hypnagogic rollercoaster ride through outback Texas, incorporating rock’n’roll rhythms and hooks with a hazey, subdued aesthetic that rolled over to the soft, lethargic vocals of frontman Jacob Bruce. [read more]
