Nearly 30 years of a career and already 13 albums: the tireless Scots remain faithful, with “Do Not Dare to Dream,” to their sparkling vocal harmonies and silky songwriting.
Averse to gloom, Teenage Fanclub are among those bands that welcome us with open arms, like a folk refuge or a comforting pop security blanket, far from artists who create in reaction to their previous albums. Rather than a radical gesture, the Glasgow quintet’s albums seem simply to continue a single stream of thought and sensitivity begun at the outset of their career in the early 1990s.
A timeless, self-contained indie pop craft whose new chapter (the thirteenth of this unbroken career) was conceived precisely in a remote studio, on the edge of the world, on the island of Great Bernera, in the Hebrides archipelago – the video for Day in the Sun, a single as playful as it is nostalgic, was shot on site.
A waking dream
Do Not Dare to Dream thus restates the usual codes that illuminate Teenage Fanclub’s work: gracefully touched vocal harmonies (as on the remarkable Over and Over, worthy of the Byrds, or the pastoral Take Time), instantly classic melodies and silky songwriting, while allowing themselves welcome digressions, such as the stunning coda of Tomorrow People or the cosmic keyboards of Euros Childs, the Welshman and former leader wonderfully eccentric of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, who joined the Scottish band in 2019. A waking dream.
Do Not Dare to Dream (Merge Records/Modulor). Release on October 9. Live at Le Marché Gare, Lyon, on October 19; at La Laiterie, Strasbourg, on the 20th and at Petit Bain, Paris, on the 21st.
<section class="col-12 no-padding">
<div class="advertise ads-container ads-Banniere-Basse" data-formatid="Banniere-Basse">
<div class="ads-placeholder"></div>
<div class="js-ads ads-core-placer" id="ad-BanniereBasse" data-ads-core="{" type>
</div>
</div>
</section>
</div>