Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub Hops on ‘Bandwagonesque’ for Fun Ride

TEENAGE FANCLUB*** “Bandwagonesque” DGC

Post-Knack American “power pop” has had a tough go of it; ask the underappreciated Posies and Jellyfish, for starters, or the recently faltering Smithereens. On the other hand, there’s a huge, immediate groundswell of support for Scotland’s Teenage Fanclub, whose U.S. debut wasdubbed album of the year by gun-jumping Spin magazine before it was even released.

These boys are ‘tweeners in more than just name, swirling grunge and melody like the lighter side of Nirvana. While it takes a stretch of imagination to hear a masterpiece in this modest retro/revisionist rock, it’s easy to see why the quartet is catching on with the alternative set where other poppers have pooped out: The emphasis is on the power , as in politically correct power chords not too far from the proverbial garage. And whereas predecessors strewn along the road have typically been overridingly Beatlesque, the deadpan-voiced perpetrators of “Bandwagonesque” tend to stay in a less peppy, mid-tempo mold and to sound a little more like, say, the Jesus and Mary Chain recording “The Kids Are Alright.”

Some left-field ventures (such as a pointless, noisy instrumental called “Satan”) keep the project from getting too genre-specific. This is finally an exercise in juvenilia, albeit a fun one; at least no one will charge the twentysomething Teens with false advertising.

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